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"11 academic publishers, including major players like Taylor & Francis and Oxford University Press, would be raising the cost of short-term e-book loans effective June 1. In some cases the increase would be as much as 300 percent."

"What solutions might we find within our community to solve the problem of rising textbook prices? In our latest issue brief, Nancy Maron, Ithaka S+R's Program Director for Sustainability and Scholarly Communications, looks at recent trends in textbook publishing and suggests that collaborations between university presses and academic libraries might yield a new breed of textbook more aligned to the needs of faculty and students."

This year, the fifth annual Publishers for Development (PfD) conference explored current developments in scholarly communication including their impact on publishers, researchers and information professionals in the global South. The rapid growth in open access, the potential for social media to increase communication of research and also new measures for the way research is used were all topics viewed from a Southern perspective. The one-day conference was held in London on 15 October and titled 'Forward Thinking: Developing a global research cycle which fully engages South and North'. It brought together publishers from 16 publishing houses, librarians and researchers from universities in Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Also present were representatives of organisations involved in research access, production and use such as the World Bank, African Journals Online, Research4Life, Development Research Uptake in Sub-Saharan Africa (DRUSSA), Talloires Network and Partnerships in Health Information.

Here is a list of the core readings and additional resources for each module from the Open Knowledge Changing the Global Course of Learning MOOC--a partial textbook for the course.

Sitios muy interesantes: http://mcpress.media-commons.org/plannedobsolescence/five-the-university/the-history-of-the-university-press/ http://www.amacad.org/publications/spring2002/hesse.pdf http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/1/1-22/1.full.pdf+html http://www.ccel.org/ccel/benedict/rule2/files/rule2.html#ch33 http://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262512664_Download_the_full_text.pdf

thanks for sharing this

This recently published book, by a University of British Columbia journalism professor named Alfred Hermida, questions how the new culture of sharing and collaboration-and the pace of change that sharing enables-changes our lives. It's particularly interesting for us because it doesn't back away from the challenges that open access poses for us: how does being both creator and consumer change us? How does blurring the lines between these two change the way we think about the balance between copyright and the public good? Hermida doesn't tackle these last questions directly, but he provides a useful lens for thinking about our changing roles and how open knowledge and sharing need to reflect that. Considering the book's focus on sharing, it's somewhat ironic that it's not open access, but I highly recommend checking it out. It's received significant attention in the Canadian press and is exactly the kind of mainstream attention that can get conversations about open access started.

Not everything can be shared. Aside from the 14 reasons what makes people share knowledge is because they are trust each one with the knowledge that they will share will be beneficial to the receiver of the knowledge or learning. Knowledge is power when shared.

"Instead of calling for more money to prop up a traditional model that was never particularly viable in the first place, we need to embrace a variety of alternatives. Academic librarians are well positioned to lead the way here, both because of their long history of managing change and because they often hold the purse strings."

This is a thesis from a professor who occasionally teaches a Scholarly Communication course at UBC iSchool. It deals with complicated questions of economics of scholarly publishing. If you are looking for sources for research, there is a lot in here for you. Worth skimming through and reading any chapters of interest. "Freedom for Scholarship in the Internet Age examines distortion in the current scholarly communication system and alternatives, focusing on the potential of open access. High profits for a select few scholarly journal publishers in the area of science, technology, and medicine contrast with other portions of the scholarly publishing system such as university presses that are struggling to survive."