The panel discussion “Ready or Not: Trends, Challenges, and Tech in Academic and Research Libraries” marked the release of the New Media Consortium (NMC) Horizon Report, 2017 Library Edition. NMC has released 15 years of reports on technology that will affect higher learning, exploring academic and research libraries in a global context. According to Samantha … Continue reading Technology Trends, Open Access, and Roxane Gay
Journal publisher Elsevier, which claimed it was losing hundreds to thousands of dollars for each of its articles pirated on the site, sued to have it shut down. For these reasons, Judge Robert W. Sweet of the Southern District of New York ordered Sci-Hub.org to cease operations in October 2015. But that’s not the end … Continue reading Sci-Hub: What It Is and Why It Matters
But with prices skyrocketing—the cost of textbooks has increased 73% since 2006, according to a 2016 report by the Student Public Interest Research Groups—some libraries and networks are using creative incentives to get OERs into the classroom. Texas A&M University Libraries, in partnership with the school’s student government, has established what it believes to be the … Continue reading Pushing for Open Textbooks
Gale goes 3D Gale and Cyber Science 3D have partnered to bring science to life for students. With both academic and high school students in mind, Gale—a division of Cengage Learning—has created three distinct interactive science programs that allow students to explore multiple science-based subjects. One program, used as a learning tool for high school and introductory … Continue reading Libraries Open Up
Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, describes a situation that has prevailed in academe for some time now. Universities pay scholars to research and publish. Then libraries are forced to buy back that research at prices that are rapidly becoming unsustainable. To compound injury with insult, university libraries must also buy … Continue reading Elsevier and Open Access Journals
“I really believe open access is not a passing fad,” Mary Ellen Davis, executive director of ALA’s Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) division, told an open-access panel at the American Historical Association’s 2014 annual meeting. “I believe open access is a durable feature of the landscape of scholarly communication.” ACRL made its scholarly … Continue reading Open Access Publishing
OA journals—categorized as “gold OA” to distinguish them from content placed in an institutional or subject repository (“green OA”)—make all of their peer-reviewed articles freely available online, in the final version and layout, as soon as they are published. DOAJ is the key directory for OA journals, with increasingly robust standards as to what can … Continue reading Idealism and Opportunism
The name of Xavier’s disorder is virtually unpronounceable: megalencephaly, polymicrogyria, polydactyly, and hydrocephalus syndrome, or MPPH for short. First identified in 2004, the syndrome is little understood, with no known cause and only about a dozen cases worldwide. “I think that the case for open access really hits home when you have a situation where … Continue reading How Open Access Scholarship Saves Lives
The notion that the research efforts of a group of people with varying opinions, when aggregated, can result in better information than a specific expert could come up with—aka “crowdsourcing”—has been around for some time. It’s one of the ideas on which the 10-year-old Wikipedia is based. So it seemed only natural when one of … Continue reading Libraries Tap into Crowd Power
