MIT Press and the University of Michigan Press have both announced plans to start selling their ebook collections directly to libraries by creating their own distribution platforms.
The publishers previously did not have a mechanism for selling to institutions directly. Instead, access to ebooks was largely brokered through third-party acquisition services such as EBSCO, ProQuest, OverDrive, Project Muse and JSTOR.
Academic Libraries
Europe’s open-access drive escalates as university stand-offs spread
Bold efforts to push academic publishing towards an open-access model are gaining steam. Negotiators from libraries and university consortia across Europe are sharing tactics on how to broker new kinds of contracts that could see more articles appear outside paywalls. And inspired by the results of a stand-off in Germany, they increasingly declare that if they don’t like what publishers offer, they will refuse to pay for journal access at all. On 16 May, a Swedish consortium became the latest to say that it wouldn’t renew its contract, with publishing giant Elsevier.
From Europe’s open-access drive escalates as university stand-offs spread
University of Rhode Island Library Opening Artificial Intelligence Lab
In the fall semester of 2018, a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab will be accessible to all University of Rhode Island students on the first floor of the Robert L. Carothers Library. Funded by a $143,065 grant from The Champlin Foundation, the AI Lab is believed to be the first in the nation to be located in a library.
From Artificial Intelligence Lab to be Accessible to All URI Students
Germany vs Elsevier: universities win temporary journal access after refusing to pay fees
The Dutch publishing giant Elsevier has granted uninterrupted access to its paywalled journals for researchers at around 200 German universities and research institutes that had refused to renew their individual subscriptions at the end of 2017.
From Germany vs Elsevier: universities win temporary journal access after refusing to pay fees
One of the first books ever printed in England discovered by university librarian
The University of Reading has discovered pages of one of the first books printed in England, dating from the 15th century.
The pages of a mediaeval priest’s handbook, dating to between 1476 and 1477, were found in the University’s archives by Special Collections librarian Erika Delbecque while she was cataloguing thousands of items showing the history of print and graphic design.
From One of the first books ever printed in England discovered by university librarian | The Independent
Privacy and Academic Libraries Right Now
Beyond reading this report and preprint, what can we do to learn more and help protect our patrons’ privacy (and our own)? Keeping up with these issues is a good first step….
We can also work to audit our own internal library systems and practices, and to push the vendors we work with to protect patron privacy. Further, we can increase digital privacy awareness among ourselves, our coworkers, and our patrons.
Publishers Still Fighting to Bury Universities, Libraries in Fees for Making Fair Use of Academic Excerpts
On behalf of three national library associations, EFF today urged a federal appeals court for the second time to protect librarians’ and students’ rights to make fair use of excerpts from academic books and research.
Equipping librarians to code: ALA, Google launch ready to code university pilot program
“Libraries play a vital role in our communities, and Google is proud to build on our partnership with ALA,” noted Hai Hong, who leads US outreach on Google’s K-12 Education team. “We’re excited to double down on the findings of Ready to Code 1 by equipping librarians with the knowledge and skills to cultivate computational thinking and coding skills in our youth. Given the ubiquity of technology and the half-a-million unfilled tech jobs in the country, we need to ensure that all youth understand the world around them and have the opportunity to develop the essential skills that employers – and our nation’s economy – require.”
Robot-written reviews fool academics
Using automatic text generation software, computer scientists at Italy’s University of Trieste created a series of fake peer reviews of genuine journal papers and asked academics of different levels of seniority to say whether they agreed with their recommendations to accept for publication or not.
In a quarter of cases, academics said they agreed with the fake review’s conclusions, even though they were entirely made up of computer-generated gobbledegook – or, rather, sentences picked at random from a selection of peer reviews taken from subjects as diverse as brain science, ecology and ornithology.
Academic Torrents
Welcome to Academic Torrents!
Making 15.47TB of research data available.We’ve designed a distributed system for sharing enormous datasets – for researchers, by researchers. The result is a scalable, secure, and fault-tolerant repository for data, with blazing fast download speeds.
From Academic Torrents
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