Group items tagged

I have proposed that the university library could function as a re-invented university press. However, this guide is intended, over the course of as many parts as I need to be able to write this in manageable chunks, to signpost a third way. This guide is for academics who want to establish their own journals that are:Peer reviewed, in a traditional pre-review modelOpen Access and free in monetary terms for authors and readersPreserved, safe and archived in the event of catastrophe or foldReputable: run by consensus of leaders in a field

The board is absolutely crucial. Academic journals work on a system of academic capital; you need respected individuals who are willing to sit on your board, even if they are only lending their name and you end up doing most of the legwork. It should only be a matter of time before academics realise that journal brand isn’t (or shouldn’t be) affiliated to publishers, but rather to the academics who choose to endow a journal with their support.

When the first articles start flooding in, you’ll need all the help you can get. These have to be people you can trust to understand the challenges you’re facing. They need to set the bar high for the first issue while also appreciating the difficulties of attracting the big names to start-up journals. Contact people early so that you’re ready to go.

The publishers’ complaint takes issue with the way the upstart produces its open-education textbooks, which Boundless bills as free substitutes for expensive printed material. To gain access to the digital alternatives, students select the traditional books assigned in their classes, and Boundless pulls content from an array of open-education sources to knit together a text that the company claims is as good as the designated book. The company calls this mapping of printed book to open material “alignment”—a tactic the complaint said creates a finished product that violates the publishers’ copyrights.

The Walters is a museum that’s free to the public, and to be public these days is to be on the Internet. Therefore to be a public museum your digital data should be free. And the great thing about digital data, particularly of historic collections, is that they’re the greatest advert that these collections have. So: Why on Earth would you limit how people can use them? The digital data is not a threat to the real data, it’s just an advertisement that only increases the aura of the original, so there just doesn’t seem to be any point in putting restrictions on the data.

Institutions with special collections, particularly museums — libraries perhaps less so — want to improve their brand and raise visitorship. One way in which they can do that is through advertising. And what better way to advertise than by making instantly available, or as available as possible, images of their collections? Because that’s how they get known.

The Harvard Library announced it is making more than 12 million catalog records from Harvard’s 73 libraries publicly available.

Harvard Library announced its open distribution of metadata from its Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) scholarly article repository under a similar CC0 license.