This fall, a strange silence has fallen over a Web site that long amplified the voices of hundreds of student newspapers.

UWIRE, a popular service that aggregated articles from student newspapers across the country, promoting student journalism both within higher education and to the outside world, has disappeared. Visits to the Web site in October returned a "problem loading page" message. Student newspapers that relied on the service to republish articles from other newspapers haven't heard a word. Student editors who were paid to scour campus papers to find content for the site received an abrupt e-mail message on October 4 telling them the site was being "temporarily suspended" but offering no explanation as to why. They still haven't received payment for their work in September, some said.

Those who operate UWIRE, which was founded in 1994 and facilitated...

The open-access journal Innovate, published by the Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University, is ceasing publication, Stephen Downes announced on his blog and a university spokesperson confirmed.

The peer-reviewed online journal focused on how information technology could be used to enhance academic, governmental, and business settings. It was started in 2004 by James L. Morrison, professor emeritus of educational leadership at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and had 76,282 subscribers from 271 countries.

In its last issue, Innovate had stories about creating learning environments in Second Life, approaches to develop quality assurance in online education, and a...

Open access is in the air. The National Center for Atmospheric Research, a national laboratory managed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, just announced that all of its scientists have to place their published journal articles in OpenSky, a new digital repository that will be open to anyone who wants to read those articles.

Well, not completely open. "The repository will be free and available to the public, but access to the works it contains will depend upon the policies of their publishers," the laboratory and its managing corporation said in a written statement.

What that really means, says Mary Marlino, director of the center's library, is that the repository will be open, but some articles will be closed. "We will honor publishers' embargoes," she says. Major journal publishers -- in...

The Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based nonprofit group, has created a system for helping people find digital books on the Internet. The service, called BookServer, collects information on digital books that are available online, either free or for a fee. Those in charge of the project say they hope it will make it easier for people to use digital material online.

Authors, publishers, libraries, and book sellers -- in other words, anyone who offers free or paid books online -- can index their materials so they appear when people conduct a search on BookServer.

"This is a mechanism by which we can expose the books that are available for lending," said Peter Brantley, director of the BookServer project at the Internet Archive. "We're trying to get books into the hands of readers as many different ways as...

At least one university press does not like the Federal Trade Commission's new guidelines governing "endorsements and testimonials." Laura Sell, a senior publicist for Duke University Press, wrote on the press's blog that the new rules "will have a chilling effect on the online book-reviewing community" -- a community that publishers rely on more and more as print review outlets fade away.

The FTC guidelines now say that "the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service." If they...

Making free e-textbooks available to students does not affect sales of the print books, a new report from a publicly funded group in Britain suggests.

But the managing director of a major publishing company is challenging those findings, saying sales of print materials were not as high as expected during the period when e-books were available for free.

A draft of the report was presented at a seminar in London this week. From November 2007 to December 2008, students at 127 British universities were able to access 36 e-books at no charge. According to the report, sales for the titles fell by 18.7 percent from 2006 to 2007, before the study began. From 2007 to 2008, after the study began, sales for the same titles fell 13.7 percent.

The study was conducted by JISC Collections, a service that negotiates with publishers and owners of digital content for British...

Search giant Google Inc. announced today that it has purchased reCaptcha, a company that began as a research project at Carnegie Mellon University. ReCaptcha develops online word puzzles to serve both as Web-site security and to help digitize printed text, and Google says it will use it in projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search.

The Carnegie Mellon researchers began their reCaptcha project in 2007 in the hope of killing two birds with one stone. The method takes the distorted word puzzles aimed at keeping hackers and spambots from logging into Web pages, and turns them into micro-archiving machines.

The project...

In an effort to support alternatives to traditional scholarly publishing, five major research universities announced their joint commitment to open-access journals on Monday.

The institutions—Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California at Berkeley—signed a compact agreeing to the “timely establishment” of mechanisms for providing financial support for free open-access journals.

While conventional journals require institutions to pay subscription fees to access articles, open-access publications make their material free to the public, thus aiding libraries forced to cut back during difficult financial times,...

Publish a monograph on 19th-century literature and have it reviewed within 90 days of its publication? That's crazy talk -- or was, until the debut of New Books on Literature 19, or NBOL-19. The site, which went live on September 1, is an online-only journal dedicated to reviews of new scholarly books on 19th-century literature. It's edited by James A.W. Heffernan, an emeritus professor of English at Dartmouth College. (Read more about the frustrations that prompted him to test a quick-turnaround editorial model.) Mr. Heffernan put together a team of scholarly reviewers, including graduate students. More than 100 recent monographs have been assigned for review, with 20 or so reviews posted on the site so far. Is this the metabolic fix that the...

This morning Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, held up a new, wider model of the Kindle loaded with a biology textbook — marking the company’s official entrance into the electronic-textbook market.

The news had been widely leaked all week, and the rumors turned out to be true. The screen on the new version of Kindle is 9.7 inches across — much bigger than the other Kindle, which will still be offered. And the company has set up pilot projects this fall at six higher-education institutions — Arizona State University, Case Western Reserve University, Pace University, Princeton University, Reed College, and the University of Virginia’s business school.

New details included the price: $489. And the publishers involved with the pilot projects: Pearson, Cengage Learning, and John Wiley & Sons.

I offered my take on...