Alabama-Birmingham Provost Is Sole Finalist for U. of Kentucky Presidency

May 2, 2011, 10:08 am

Eli Capilouto, provost of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is the sole finalist for the presidency of the University of Kentucky. The Board of Trustees will consider on Tuesday whether to extend a formal offer to Mr. Capilouto, who will meet today with students and members of the faculty and staff on the campus. He would succeed Lee T. Todd Jr., who announced last summer that he planned to step down this June.

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wmartin46

There are a couple of issues here to be considered. South Korea is a small country (geographically), with few natural resources. During WWII, the Japanese cut down most of Korea’s trees, converting them into fuel for its war machine. Even though Korea has replanted most of its tree stock, it has no areas like the US to allow vast forests to grow–so that paper can be manufactured from the trees. Paper has to be imported. So, shifting to digital allows Korea to free itself from the dependency on an unavailable natural resource it can not easily provide for itself.

Developing this system, will offer its technology sector a problem to solve that will, no doubt, also be exported to the world. It will be converting a “liability” into an “asset”, which is what it must do to survive, and flourish, as a nation.

This is the sort of thing the US used to be known for. But sadly, we don’t seem to be aggressively pursuing these sorts of projects as we ought to, to continue to be a world leader in all things, technological.
commentarius

“another topic for Coapi is how to shift some of the money libraries pay
for journal subscriptions over to support author-side fees charged by
some open-access publishers.”

So, the goal is to take money away from things faculty want to use, and put it toward something they don’t care about. Hard to see how they could disagree with that strategy. The math would seem to indicate that this would be even less sustainable than subscriptions, in the long run. Most OA that some authors might want to buy is from commercial publishers that offer an author-pays OA option for individual articles. This is just an added cost since we still have to subscribe to their journals anyway. And the publishers laugh all the way to the bank. They used to get our content for free, now we’ll pay them to take it. Where exactly do the savings come in?

At the risk of offending the True Believers, let’s ask real questions. What has OA done to improve libraries’ bottom lines? The added costs, both direct and indirect (fees, memberships, staff, conferences, promotion, IRs, and so on) are not trivial. Have they been offset by savings in subscriptions? No. The old journals inflate just as fast as they ever did, and there are more of them than ever. Are authors benefiting from OA? The jury is certainly still out on that one, and what passes for research about it is rife with ideological bias and wishful thinking. Are publishers adopting author-pays OA options because they believe in open access? Of course not. They only do it when they realize they can make even more money from it.

How long are we going to believe in the Scholarly Communication Fairy?
sand6432

It will be interesting to see if these universities begin to extend the discussion of OA beyond journals to books, which they have so far shied away from, thus encouraging a growing digital divide between journal and book content that makes no sense, intellectually speaking.—Sandy Thatcher
windfix

If only the US had the wherewithal to make such seemingly simple and clearly strategic decisions. Instead, we bicker about religion/politics and whether billionaires should pay taxes.