Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Feb 24, 2010, 08:46 PM

My own idea is that Information Wants to Be Free is about as supportable as the Free Lunch---as in "There's no such thing."   By that I mean that, as with the proverbial free lunch, free information is never really cost-free.   On the most basic level, there are labor and environmental and opportunity costs--and other costs too--that go along with the inarguable and inestimable benefits of free-flowing information.  More than that, anyone who thinks such things as a Google search of the Web is "free," is, to put it bluntly, a fool.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Aug 12, 2009, 09:37 AM

If academic publishing is a topic near and dear to your heart--and if you are an academic in any field from African history to archeology to the various sciences taken over by commercial price-gauging publishers; if you are a publisher; if you are a librarian; if you are dean with a faculty coming up for tenure or promotion; or if you are a provost charged with paying for all of this . . . . well, then, you should buy this book.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jun 04, 2009, 10:29 AM

Scott Jaschik has a new piece in INSIDE HIGHER ED on "The Split Over Open Access." Here's the url: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/04/open

 

Some University Press publishers signed a petition in favor of open access. Others argued that they believe in the principle but their universities hold them accountable to a bottom line as if they are businesses---and you cannot be expected to make a profit AND be expected to give away your only marketable product for free. This is the dilemma, and it is one that is also the subjet of Chris Anderson's new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Anderson is also the editor of Wired Magazine and the author of The Long Tail. He is concerned (as I have been in many essays, columns, and blogs over the last decade) with the inherent contradictions in the idea that "information wants to be free" when it costs something to produce that information. Who pays the price of consumer's "free" choices? And, in the scholarly world, if we are evaluated on our publications, if our universities insist that our scholarly publishers break even, and yet if we want them to give away their products for free, who profits in the long run and who suffers? These are very important questions.

 

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jun 03, 2009, 08:15 PM
Lessons from Maryland

On April 23, 2009, the University Senate at the University of Maryland voted 37-24 to reject a proposed OA policy.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2009/04/faculty-votes-against-oa-policy-at.html

A really brilliant account by Peter Suber of the Open Access vote and some of the major issues at University of Maryland, publish by SPARC Open Access Newsletter, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/06-02-09.htm : "The defeated policy would have encouraged green OA (deposit in the institutional repository), encouraged gold OA (submission to OA journals), and required neither.

Is the Maryland vote ominous or anomalous? Either way, supporters of OA should try to understand it. Whatever its causes, they could arise again elsewhere. At the same time, we should understand why many stronger OA policies have been accepted at other campuses. . . . "

Submitted by mdailey on Jul 15, 2008, 03:45 PM
The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) has established the Scholarly Kitchen - a comprehensive resource and place to go to for exciting dialogue on current trends and information on what?s happening in the scholarly publishing community!

The blog, launched this spring, is primaril

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Feb 26, 2008, 09:20 AM
The Gutenberg-e history monographs, begun in 1999 in collaboration with the American Historical Association, is going open source. It's a great resource--but none of the predictions about how easy and cheap it would be and all the problems of scholarly publishing it would solve have come true. It's important to think (yet again!) about why. Plus a free link (for one month) to the CHE piece.

Submitted by jonathan.tarr on Feb 04, 2008, 05:03 PM
Read on for an excerpt from a recent The Chronicle of Higher Education article on taking the peer review process to blogs, featuring Professor Noah Wardrip-Fruin from UC-San Diego.

Submitted by jonathan.tarr on Aug 23, 2007, 05:34 PM

I just heard today from Bob Stein at the Institute for the Future of the Book about Ithaka's