An open letter was released today, signed by presidents of fifty-seven liberal arts colleges, supporting the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009. Further details are available in an article in Inside Higher Ed.
Open Book Alliance, a coalition of legal scholars, authors, publishers, librarians and technology companies has formed to ensure that, “any mass book digitization and publishing effort be open and competitive” and to oppose the Google Book Search Copyright Class Action Settlement in its current form.
The Open Book Alliance, which includes Amazon.com, Yahoo!, Special Libraries Association, Microsoft, American Society of Journalists and Authors, and Internet Archive, see the settlement as a “scheme to monopolize the access, distribution and pricing of the largest digital database of books in the world.”
Flat World Knowledge, a company which provides alternatives to high cost textbooks stated in their press release they are providing textbooks to over 38,000 students on 350 college campuses this fall, up from 1,000 students at 30 campuses this time last year.
CALPIRG and students groups across the country are campaigning to make faculty aware of the need to reduce the costs of course materials.
The Web Archiving Service provides tools to easily capture, analyze, and preserve Web content. It enables users to define sites to be captured, choose capture settings for each site, and capture the content; provides basic statistics about capture results; contains comparison tools that allow users to analyze changes on a site over time; and allows users to publish archives of Web sites that can be searched together.
The University of California’s California Digital Library (CDL) hosts the service’s tools and storage and provides information about rights management practices and collection development in web archiving, as well as web archiving training sessions. The service was developed as part of the Web-at-Risk grant, funded by the National Digital Information and Infrastructure Preservation Program and led by the CDL.
The UC Libraries have licensed a substantial collection of e-textbooks, which are available for use by faculty and students free of charge. The full list, divided into broad subject areas, is available online, as are lists of e-book titles not classified as textbooks.
Each chapter is available as a PDF file, which can be downloaded, printed, or transferred to a PDA or Kindle. Whether in the textbook category or not, all of the titles can be used in electronic course reserves, on course Web sites, in course management systems, and for many other educational purposes.
Recent articles in The New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education draw attention to the gain in popularity and business of commercial Web sites offering textbook rental. A number of campuses in the University of Wisconsin system also offer textbook rental to their students.
According to The New York Times, the U.S. Department of Justice has opened an official investigation into whether the Google Books agreement between the Internet giant and authors/publishers violates antitrust laws.
The text of the department’s notification letter is available on John Paczkowski’s Digital Daily blog.
“The University of Kansas has become the nation’s first public university to adopt an ‘open access’ policy that makes its faculty’s scholarly journal articles available for free online,” according to a press release the university issued June 26. The policy was initiated by the KU faculty and approved by the chancellor.
The articles will be available through the digital repository KU ScholarWorks.
Today, Senators Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and John Cornyn (R-TX) reintroduced the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), a bill to ensure free, timely, online access to the published results of research funded by eleven U.S. federal agencies. The bill covers unclassified research funded by the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, and Transportation as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Science Foundation.
Directors of ten university presses issued a statement supporting “the dissemination of scholarly research as broadly as possible.” Represented were University Press of Florida, University of Akron Press, University Press of New England, Athabasca University Press, Wayne State University Press, University of Calgary Press, University of Michigan Press, Rockefeller University Press, Penn State University Press, and University of Massachusetts Press.
Further details are available in Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
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