A few weeks ago Publishers Weekly published an adaptation of my June 9 blog post on the Georgia State trial on their “Soapbox” page. This week’s issue of PW contains a reply by Tom Allen, President of the Association of American Publishers. Perhaps not surprisingly, Mr. Allen and I do a good deal of talking […]
Archives for Higher Ed
The Georgia State filing – A declaration of war on the faculty?
I once took one of those pricey b-school executive education workshops designed to teach leadership skills. One of the things I learned there was the importance of distinguishing between adversaries and enemies. In academic administration, in library management, and in the life of a faculty member, one often finds oneself in positions that are adverse […]
The Card Catalog and Biblical Plagues
After extended deliberation and over twenty years after its official retirement, the University of Michigan Library decided recently to divest itself of the old card catalog — 108 cases containing over 12 million cards. The story was fairly widely covered, with a piece in the official University Record and another in the local digital newspaper, […]
On the Meaning and Importance of Peer Review
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 discuss […]
Oxford, Cambridge and Sage Sue Georgia State
It is with dismay that I read in today’s New York Times that three distinguished academic presses, Oxford, Cambridge, and Sage, are suing Georgia State for copyright infringement with regard to course websites. I cannot know the merits of the case, but two points are telling. One is that the transaction seems to be between […]
The Michigan of the East goes Open Access
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 […]
MPAA Bad, Universities Good
From yesterday’s Chronicle of Higher Education In 2005, when the Motion Picture Association of America stepped up its campaign against college movie pirates, officials with the trade group said that 44 percent of the film industry’s domestic losses were the result of illegal downloads on campus networks. That statistic — which came from a report […]
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