For more than two years, the University of Texas system figured its students and faculty members could handle having multiple usernames and passwords. Not anymore.

After initially refusing in 2007, the Texas system has agreed to join a growing number of institutions in the InCommon Federation. InCommon is an organization that makes services like JSTOR, a digital archive of scholarly journals, and Turnitin, a plagerism-detection program, all easily accessible with one username and password per user. InCommon also determines which people get access to which services. As a Chronicle article in 2007 put it, the service is like a bouncer that lets people in if they have the right wristband. InCommon also allows for participating institutions with a...

Without her knowing it, a paper that Melinda Riebolt co-wrote while getting her M.B.A. was stolen and put up for sale. And, according to an article that USA Today reported last week, that same scenario has played out many times before.

The article discusses how some essay mills -- Web sites that provide written works for students -- surreptitiously steal work and then sell it for others to pass off as their own.

For the first time, however, those who find unauthorized postings of their work online may have a way to seek legal retribution. The article says a class-action lawsuit filed in 2006 is making its way through the courts, and one judge in Illinois has found a provider liable on six counts, including fraud and copyright infringement. That site is called RC2C...

Mendeley, a Web service that lets users organize and share research papers, recently announced that it has surpassed 100,000 users, and that its database now includes some 8 million works. The announcement has generated a lot of hype for the fledgling company.

TechCrunch, a popular technology blog, says the company—which is still less than a year old—could surpass Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science, the largest research-paper database, by April 2010. Mendeley says it is doubling in size every 10 weeks.

Mendeley is more than just a dumping ground for...

Ever wanted to see a photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald's copy of the book 1984? Probably not (it looks remarkably like any other copy of the book), but if you ever do, the University of North Texas has made it easy with its new digital catalog of photos from the Dallas Police Department's investigation of the John F. Kennedy assassination.

The Dallas Morning News reports that the university's Digital Projects Unit has put 404 photographs from the investigation on its Portal to Texas History Web site. All the photos had been available to the public on a...

As mobile phones begin functioning more like minicomputers, they also take on more security risks.

That's why the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology recently received a $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to work toward developing safer mobile devices and telecommunication networks that serve such devices. The project's researchers hope to protect mobile devices from viruses and malware that can steal personal information.

“Since mobile phones typically lack security features found on desktop computers, such as antivirus software, we need to accept that the mobile devices will ultimately be successfully attacked," said Jonathon Giffin, an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science, in a news release. "Therefore our research focus is to develop effective attack-recovery strategies.”

First,...

When it comes to budget cuts in 2009, nothing is sacrosanct, not even information technology.

According to a new report from the Campus Computing Project, IT budgets are being slashed in colleges and universities across the country despite a rising demand for resources and services. The report, which surveyed 500 institutions, found that 48 percent of respondents were facing IT budget cuts for the current academic year, as compared with 30.6 percent last year and just 13.1 percent in 2007. Likewise, the number of institutions with more money for IT was down to only 21.4 percent this year from 49 percent in 2008.

“IT has already gone through serious budget cuts after the dot-com bubble burst,” Kenneth C. Green, founding director of the Campus Computing Project, told The Chronicle of Higher Education. “A second decline is not easy to...

Illicit file sharing isn’t just for kids these days. Once mainly used for downloading pirated music, sites have sprung up on the Internet that allow free swapping of academic journals (think Napster’s younger dweeby brother).

A new study, published in the Internet Journal of Medical Informatics, looks at a site aimed specifically at medical professionals and students and finds that thousands of people were obtaining non-open-access materials free of charge. The article says that in a six-month period of watching the unnamed site, nearly 5,500 articles were exchanged, costing journals about $700,000 in that time, or about...

By opening the largest online rental service for scientific, technical, and research journals, the company Deep Dyve is hoping to do for academic publications what Netflix has done for movies: make them easily accessible and inexpensive for everyone.

The Web site has been an academic-journal search engine since 2005 and unveiled its rental program this week. Now anyone can “rent” an article—which means you can view it on your computer without ownership rights or printing capabilities—for as little as 99 cents for 24 hours. Users can also subscribe for monthly passes. Currently the site has 30 million articles from various peer-reviewed journals.

William Park, chief executive of Deep Dyve, says the model will not only allow more people to read articles they might otherwise not see, but will actually...

If the last four years are any indication, college-student e-mail addresses may soon be a thing of the past.

So says a report issued by Educause, a nonprofit dedicated to the advancement of information technology in higher education. The "Core Data Service Fiscal Year 2008 Summary Report" took information from nearly 930 colleges and universities regarding their IT practices and environments.

It found, among other things, that in 2008 nearly 10 percent of associate, baccalaureate, and master’s institutions as well as 25 percent of doctoral institutions were considering putting an end to student e-mail addresses because so many students were already using personal e-mail accounts. That is a large shift from the 1 to 2 percent of institutions that were considering this in 2004.

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...