My Communications of the ACM came in the main recently, and in an article about the future of scholarly publishing in computer science (in general -- and what the ACM Publications Board is thinking about doing), there was this paragraph about the attitudes of a subset of ACM members towards open …
You could say "this is a service to watch" but that would be missing the point. Yesterday the 'Unglue.It' service launched as a way to crowdsource the funding of a fee to authors to release their own works under a Creative Commons license. [caption id="p3675-tweet" align="alignright" width …
As the last DLTJ Thursday Threads of the year, the stories in this post look back to what we saw in 2011 and look forward to what we may see in 2012. Looking backwards is a list of five things we learned about publishing from O'Reilly Media and Google's 3-minute …
Two serious threads this week and one fun one. The first serious story is a look at the attitudes of e-book consumers from the Book Industry Study Group, including a finding that almost half of all e-book consumers would wait for an electronic edition up to three months after the …
This week's list of threads starts with a pointer a statement by the International Coalition of Library Consortia on the growing pressure between publishers and libraries over the appropriate rights and permissions for scholarly material. In that same vein, Joe Lucia writes about his vision for libraries and the cultural …
I recently started reading content from a tablet device and in doing so re-encountered a list of web pages stashed in a Read It Later queue that are over a year old. Not only were these pages interesting enough to read a year ago, but in light of a year's …
Hickory, with true-to-life parting attitude (left) and Mittens This week's Thursday Threads is delayed, but for good reason. If you will indulge me with a personal note, this week saw the passing of our 20-year-old cat, Hickory, and the addition of a 6-month-old kitten, Mittens, to our family. Needless to …
It wasn't too long ago that the music industry was in an uproar about stories of how easy it was to copy digital audio files and make digital copies with high fidelity. It was predicted that we would see the same thing in other media forms, and this week's DLTJ …
With the close of the year approaching, this issue marks the 14th week of DLTJ Thursday Threads. This issue has a publisher's view of Amazon's strong-arm tactics in book pricing, research into the possibility that academic authors could game Google Scholar with spam, demonstrations of how Amazon's Mechanical Turk drives …
The highlights of the past week are around publishing -- first with a model proposed by Eric Hellman in which consumers can pool enough money to pay publishers to "set a book free" under a Creative Commons license, then with an announcement by the University of Pittsburgh offering free hosting of …
If it is Thursday it must mean it is time for another in this series of Thursday Threads posts. This week there are an abundance of things that could fall into the category of "disruptive innovation" in libraries and higher education. If you find these interesting, you might want to …
The fact that the Higher Education Opportunity Act (Public Law 110-315) -- otherwise known as HEOA -- was signed into law last year is probably not big news to anyone. One of the parts of the bill that I have been following and commentedon here in DLTJ is the textbook disclosure …
A controversy is starting to pick up in the business librarian community -- primarily in the U.K. it would seem -- regarding the licensing demands of Harvard Business Press (HBP) for the inclusion of Harvard Business Review articles in EBSCOhost. HBP content in EBSCOhost carries a publisher-specific rider that says use …
The sand is really starting to shift under the traditional textbook providers as the open course content movement shows signs of, well, movement. Already this year there are two events that point to shifts in how instructors and students can shortcut the complex ecosystem of textbooks as we know it …
A recent issue of Nature published an article by Declan Butler called "Technology: The textbook of the future" included a paragraph about OhioLINK's exploration of digital textbooks:
Ongoing tests of CourseSmart e-textbooks by the University System of Ohio show that they reduce costs -- the average US student forks out some …