A Bi-Weekly Update
4/27/12
“Move Prestige to Open Access”
The Faculty Advisory Council to the Library at Harvard University has gone public with a statement on the “untenable” nature of the institution’s subscriptions to high-priced research journals. The council states that the amount paid to a handful of providers approaches $3.75M, some 20 percent of all Harvard library periodical subscriptions. Some individual titles cost as much as $40,000 per year. The council contends that “the Library has never received anything close to full reimbursement for these expenditures from overhead collected by the University on grand and research funds.” Led by the University librarian, the council urges the institution’s faculty and librarians to “move prestige to open access” by:
- depositing research articles to the institution’s open-access repository whenever copyright and licensing allow
- submitting to open-access or lower-cost journals
- urging professional associations to develop library-friendly pricing structures
How Copyright “Makes Books Vanish”
A University of Illinois law professor has analyzed the effect of copyright on the availability of books through Amazon. Perhaps not surprisingly, because publishers look at continuing market value, books fairly quickly become out of print. By contrast, copyright on a book lasts for decades, so other publishers can’t move in to publish new copies of those out-of-print titled. One way to change all this would be to dramatically shorten the copyright period, say to two decades, then charge a small fee to publishers to renew the copyright. Most publishers would never pursue that, and books would move more rapidly into the public domain where they could be printed again by multiple publishers without restriction: print-on-demand houses, e-book publishers, etc.
Infomaniac Tip
Zotero for All Your Citation Needs
Visit Zotero.org and download (using Firefox browser only) an amazing free citing and storage tool that will change your research life. Don’t forget to download the MS Word plug-in that will automatically format citations from resources you’ve stored in Zotero as you’re typing your paper. For directions on how to use Zotero, visit Trexler Library’s Zotero guide.
Calendar
5/3 – Meditation Group. Open to all Muhlenberg faculty, staff, and students. (Fulford Room, 5:00-6:00 p.m.).
5/4 – Trexler Library Annual Book Sale (in front of the library, 9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.).
5/6-5/10 – Library open around the clock for Finals Week.
