Au Courant

I spent Friday at a fascinating conference at the Columbia University Law School, on the subject of (what else?) the Google settlement. Lead counsel from all three parties, lots of other lawyers, several princpals, publishers, authors and librarians were there.
I learned something important that at some level I already knew.
The most important single [...]

In my previous post I briefly discussed peer review, which has been raised by many in the publishing industry as a justification for opposing the NIH mandate for deposit of articles into PubMed Central, and, more broadly, as a justification for the vigorous protection of publisher-held copyright in scholarly publications. In this post I [...]

Last week there was a hearing on a new bill before the House Judiciary Committee, the “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act.” Think of it as the Clear Skies Act for copyright; an odious piece of corporate welfare wrapped in a friendly layer of doublespeak. The bill, introduced by Michigan Congressman John Conyers, would prohibit [...]

Since everyone else is talking about the new open access mandate from Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, I figure I might as well jump in, too.
There are any number of details that will have to be worked out before we know how the mandate will be implemented, and we will probably never know the [...]

In this post, I get to be both an economist and a librarian. I want to argue that recessions pose at least two kinds of problems for academic libraries, one of them quite obvious, the other one less so.
The obvious problem is that recessions bring with them reductions in income – the stuff that [...]

Like everyone else who follows the blogs and listserves that everyone else follows, over the past month or so I have had the opportunity to skim thousands of comments on the new Amazon Kindle. I haven’t actually played with a Kindle, yet, but if ever a subject were well covered by the secondary literature, [...]

I hate the phrase, “scholarly communication.”
It’s not that I hate the practice, which I view as a pinnacle of human achievement, without which the life and work of many (including me) would be meaningless. It’s that the phrase itself connotes a mechanical process, rather than the transcendent purpose that underlies the activity itself.
Decoding [...]