Ethics and Publishing

Interesting in light of diminishing budgets and fewer resources being available for fact checking, etc.

Advocates for laws that would limit content aggregation on the Web

Problems with the new electronic copyright registration system are causing major delays at the U.S. Copyright Office

Justice Department is looking at the settlement between Google and AAP & the Authors Guild for violations of anti-trust law. The settlement gives Google a huge edge over competitors, at the same time it avoids resolving the Fair Use issues.

Interesting video of the Google Book Search settlemnt.

Elsevier, in cooperation with some pharmaceutical companies, published over 5 journal-like entitities from 2000-2008. These "journals" were given names that sounded basically reputable, but were essentially reprints of works that appeared in other Elsevier journals and featured works that touted the benefits of drugs produced by these drug companies.

A math journal published by Elsevier published over 300 research articles written by the Editor-in-Chief. The articles appear to have bypassed the peer-review process entirely.

Google has been working with the Federal government on facilitating access to government data - this article talks about the first fruits of that effort.

Barbara Ringer, force behind 1976 copyright act, dies

Obama HOPE poster

This article is over a year old, and soon to be updated by Chris Anderson's book of the same title, but it's still well worth the read.

Deep into this story is a comment about how publishers and authors in the future might alter content of paragraphs, chapter titles, etc. in order to move books up in a Google search, thus ensuring more visitors to the online book.

The Internet Archive asks the ruling judge to intervene in the settlement between Google and the AAP, claiming that Google will gain a monopoly on the use of orphan works.