February 2012
10 posts
“We have also heard from some Elsevier journal authors, editors and reviewers who...”
– This morning Elsevier announced it was withdrawing support for the controversial Research Works Act. The rhetoric is priceless. My favorite line is the one above. As if people were just stymied by the contradiction: “Elsevier is usually so good; why are they being evil?” The...
“If Amazon succeeds, the free market will have had little to do with it.”
– The Author’s Guild. is an interesting, pro-free market critique of Amazon - the state plays no role, and the monopoly solely comes from what is seen as an immoral use of economic power. The promise of an e-book future is completely overlooked; it says a lot about the position of the...
WatchLibrary of Congress = 28 Million books 1 book = 1 MB 28 million x 1 MB = 26-28 Terabytes = all the books
As Brewster Kahle says, “You could put it a single shopping cart at Best Buy - and not go completely broke! You could have all of the words in the Library of Congress and it would be [about the size of a single book box from a moving company.] It would spin for a while, but...
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Library.nu: Modern era's "Destruction of the...
The description above may come as a surprise to people who never sampled the wares of this fantastic resource. But the description, made by someone named Samir Huseyn on Twitter earlier today, is a fitting one. It was likely nowhere near as extensive as the library of Alexandria, but the last time I visited, it had thousands of pages and likely almost 100k objects in its catalog (according to...
“Of course, they had also grown up with a torrent of pirated resources available...”
– The passage above is from an essay in last week’s Inside Higher Ed written by two of my colleagues here at NITLE. It is an interesting read which touches on some of the key issues facing higher education - and a possible future for the people who have the most passion and commitment to its...
“What is crucial to understand is that academic publishing is not a free market....”
– From the same amazing Boston Globe piece, the quickest and clearest summary of academic publishing’s dysfunction I’ve ever seen. It is VITALLY IMPORTANT that everyone in the ecosystem understand these basic facts. (via arlpolicynotes)
Exit, Voice, and Education Reform
School choice and education reform are key examples of what led Albert Hirschman to write his economic treatise Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. In this long essay (written in 1970), Hirschman lays out the terms of his problematic in relation to the two major ways of thinking about human institutions: those of political science and those of economics. Voice belongs to the former and Exit to the...
Unraveling (some of) the mysteries of the Elsevier... →
I find the comments (in the linked post above) disparaging the people involved in this boycott quite tedious and ahistorical. I tend to agree with Mark Sandler and others who have pointed out that this is a political movement and that it is, quite possibly, just beginning. Elsevier is a big target, which explains why it was chosen. There are obviously mitigating circumstances that make it less...
“As we adapt to the digital age, arcane copyright laws that offer no benefit even...”
– Time to update copyright law? - CNN.com (via arlpolicynotes) 