Citing rapidly rising costs, the science and medical libraries of Yale University are stopping paying for faculty members’ articles to be published by BioMed Central, one of the two largest open-access publishers. (The university is keeping its membership in the Public Library of Science, the other well-known open-access publisher.)

The libraries paid BioMed Central less than $4,700 in 2005, but in 2006 had to pay $31,625, to publish articles in the journals, which are all freely available online. “This experiment in open-access publishing has proved unsustainable,” wrote Ann Okerson, R. Kenny Marone, and David Stern, of the Yale libraries.

The publisher responded to last week’s announcement on Tuesday in a blog post. “An increase in the number of open-access articles being submitted and going on to be published does lead to an increase in the total cost of the open-access publishing...

By now, you’ve probably heard about Google News’s latest project: a tool that lets the subjects of news stories place comments alongside the articles themselves. (The full details are here.)

Obviously many professors, whether acting as experts or as activists, have plenty of experience with the press — and, most likely, some experience being frustrated with reporters. So here’s our question: If you’d received some unflattering coverage in the news, would you use this service? Or is it just an example of “citizen journalism” run amuck? —Brock Read

It’s been a rough summer for “John Doe” subpoenas. The Recording Industry Association of America routinely sends the documents to colleges, asking for the names of song-swapping suspects identified only by their Internet-protocol numbers. For the most part, campus officials have complied.

But recently, efforts to challenge the John Doe strategy have gained steam. Now a group of students at Oklahoma State University are asking a judge to quash a subpoena sent by the recording industry, and as Ars Technica points out, they’re leaving no stone unturned.

Like other people who have fought the John Doe subpoenas, the students are arguing that the industry group has no justification for using ex parte discovery tactics, which are usually reserved for extreme circumstances.

But the Oklahoma State group has also tried to dismantle the testimony of Carlos Linares, an RIAA witness who testified in an ...

The governing board of the National Science Foundation today approved a plan to build the world’s most powerful supercomputer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The university will be awarded $208-million over the next four and a half years to construct Blue Waters, a machine that will break the petaflop barrier. In other words, the computer will be able to perform more than one quadrillion operations in a second.

The board also pledged to send $65-million to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s Joint Institute for Computational Sciences, which will build a supercomputer that operates at speeds of just under a petaflop.

Illinois’s prestigious grant was coveted by many American research institutions, some of which argued that the country’s strongest supercomputers should be kept at national laboratories. But the university appears to have won out: The foundation is...

The Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies’ list of Top 100 Tools for Learning — culled from top-10 charts created by e-learning experts — names a wide array of tech tools that professors have come to love. Among the items that made the cut are Web browsers, e-mail clients, RSS feeders, blogging programs, and, of course, Microsoft’s evergreen PowerPoint presentation software.

But online library resources, which would seem like a good fit for e-learners, are notably absent from the master list. What gives? “It’s not as if the responding experts ignored information-retrieval tools,” writes Steven Bell at ACRLog. “Both Google and Google Scholar are on the top-100 list. And it’s not as if these experts wouldn’t know something about library databases.”

Mr. Bell, the associate university librarian for research and instructional services at Temple University, argues that librarians just...

Now that the English-language version of Wikipedia has accumulated nearly two million articles, the site is running short on “low-hanging fruit” — important subjects that haven’t yet been honored with entries of their own. Now that most of its dead-end red links have been replaced with real content, where does the online encyclopedia head next?

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s co-founder, considers that question in an interview with The New York Times:I remember when Africa was a red link. And you could click on Africa and you could type, “Africa is a continent,” hit save, and you were the pioneer who discovered Africa. Obviously now that is not true anymore. For nearly two million topics in English there already is some kind of an article. And it gets to be problematic in some areas, if you think philosophically, how many articles could there legitimately be in Wikipedia. That’s a question I am...

Just in time for back-to-school season, Wired has written a guide to file sharing for students excited by the prospect of high-speed networking. The article isn’t revelatory, but it’s surprisingly frank about the factors students may consider when deciding how to swap songs and movies without getting into legal trouble.

One-click hosting sites, like RapidShare and SendSpace, let users upload files to others with “maximum privacy,” Wired notes, but “it’s often faster to carry a flash drive to your on-campus friends.” College officials may wish the magazine issued a sterner warning about the illegality of piracy, but they might want to give the guide a look: It does offer insight into why many students now try darknets and hosting sites in lieu of more traditional peer-to-peer services. —Brock Read

For nearly 40 years, the photographic film from the Apollo moon missions has remained literally frozen in time, sitting in a freezer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, untouched by anyone but a handful of researchers.

Now a team from Arizona State University, led by a geological sciences professor, Mark S. Robinson, from the university’s School of Earth and Space Exploration, has collaborated with NASA to create a public digital archive of each frame of the film — more than 36,000 shots in all.

The resulting archive will be made available to the general public via a Web site run by Arizona State students. It’s the first time the body of film from the nine manned moon missions has been digitized in its entirety, and the first time that most people, even most lunar scientists, will get to see the images at such a high level of detail.

For the project, which is slated to take three...

What happens on Facebook seldom stays on Facebook, so the social networking Web site would seem like a terrible place to organize a cheating ring. But a group of students at Cardiff University, in Wales, may have done just that, campus officials say.

The university is investigating about 20 bioscience students who joined a Facebook group and allegedly used it to insult their professor and collude on course work, Wales on Sunday reports.

The group — which boasted about 100 members, most of whom are not accused of collusion or defamation — has been shut down, but it is not yet clear what discipline the 20 purported offenders may face. —Brock Read

Some librarians grimaced last year as federal lawmakers considered the Deleting Online Predators Act — a bill that would have required libraries to block minors from using public computers to visit social networks, chat rooms, and perhaps some other sites.

But a newly proposed measure, also meant to shield children from bad guys on the Web, looks a bit more palatable to librarians. The Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act, introduced yesterday by a group of five senators, focuses chiefly on requiring Internet-service providers to report child pornography, according to CNET News.

The bill calls on schools to develop educational campaigns about online safety, but it doesn’t ask librarians to clamp down on Web access. —Brock Read