Bi-Weekly Update
4/12/13
Open Access at Muhlenberg
On April 10, several faculty and staff met in the Hoffman House to discuss open access as it pertains to academic publishing. Thanks to Center for Ethics funding, wine and cheese made the conversation that much livelier. (The subject of open access dovetails nicely with marketplace ethics, the theme of this year’s Center for Ethics programming.)
At the meeting, several important questions were addressed: Just what is open access? How have other institutions such as Harvard and our neighbor Lafayette encouraged open access to their faculty’s pubications? Is there anything Muhlenberg could or should be doing?
The conversation covered common justifications for OA:
- the increasing cost of academic journals, translating into huge profit margins for publishers like Elsevier
- the ethical imperative to make scholarly publishing more widely available, especially research that has been funded by taxpayer dollars
- the lack of exposure that academic authors get for their work through traditional subscription models.
and concerns about OA:
- the cost of publication has the potential to fall back on the author or institution
What are your thoughts about open access?
ALA President vs. President of Authors Guild
The president of ALA, Maureen Sullivan, in a recent letter to the editor of the New York Times, responded to an earlier op-ed penned by the president of the Authors Guild, Scott Turow. Where Turow had argued that libraries’ circulation of e-books to the public undermines author profits, Sullivan retorted just as passionately that library circulation actually increases profits of authors by promoting interest in their books.
Unfortunately neither side presented any data specific to e-books. Perhaps it’s too early to know what effect public lending of e-books will have, or if publishers and libraries can negotiate a licensing model satisfying to all parties concerned.
NITLE Webinar
Upcoming NITLE webinar hosted in Trexler Library, rm. B02:
Digital Reading Practices for the Liberal Arts Classroom April 18, 3:00pm – 4:00pm
http://www.nitle.org/live/events/171-digital-reading-practices-for-the-liberal-arts
Infomaniac
National Digital Public Library of America
Some are saying that what was Google’s loss is now the public’s gain. If all goes as planned–as it sometimes does–then the Digital Public Library of America will open its virtual doors next week, on April 18.
Several discreet entities such as Library of Congress, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive, along with several universities and public libraries will bring their resources under one virtual roof.
Calendar
5/3 Trexler Library Annual Book Sale. Thousands of titles: everything must go! A wealth of choices for your summer reading pleasure. 9:00-5:00. Front steps, Trexler Library. (PS We are still accepting donations of fiction for the sale.)
