June 4, 2013, 3:12 pm
By Jennifer Howard
A group of scholarly publishers is proposing a publisher-run partnership to make it easier for agencies and researchers to comply with the federal government’s new open-access policy.
Called Chorus—the Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States—the partnership would use publishers’ existing infrastructure to identify and provide free access to peer-reviewed articles based on publicly supported research. The proposal comes as an August deadline looms for federal agencies to comply with the new policy.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued the open-access directive in February. It applies to agencies with more than $100-million to spend every year on research and development.
The precise details of how the clearinghouse would work and who would be directly in charge of it have yet to emerge. According to a background document circulated…
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April 22, 2013, 6:02 pm
By Jake New
Pearson, the publishing and education giant, announced on Monday that it had acquired Learning Catalytics, a cloud-based assessment system created by three Harvard University educators.
The acquisition is the latest move by the company to extend its reach into college classrooms beyond just textbooks.
In the past two years, Pearson has spent more than $1-billion acquiring and investing in education companies. In 2011 the company released OpenClass, a cloud-based learning-management system. Last year it acquired EmbanetCompass, a company that provides online-learning services to nonprofit universities.
Pearson was interested in Learning Catalytics because of its ability to provide instant feedback to instructors as well as to help students engage more effectively with peers, said Paul Corey, Pearson’s president for science, business, and technology.
“We were attracted to its…
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March 29, 2013, 5:04 pm
By Jake New
The Society for Scholarly Publishing has removed two blog posts about a legal battle between a scholarly publisher and a librarian after a lawyer representing the publisher threatened to sue the society.
The posts were written by Rick Anderson, a librarian at the University of Utah, for The Scholarly Kitchen, a blog published by the society, which is a nonprofit organization of publishers, printers, librarians, and editors. In the posts, Mr. Anderson discussed a lawsuit filed by Edwin Mellen Press against Dale Askey, a librarian at McMaster University, in Ontario, and against the university itself.
Mr. Askey and McMaster were sued for more than $3-million by the press after the librarian wrote a blog post criticizing the publisher in 2010. The press dropped the lawsuit in early March. A separate lawsuit, filed by the press’s founder, Herbert Richardson, against Mr. Askey,…
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March 26, 2013, 4:56 am
By Jake New
[Updated (3/27/2013, 12:46 p.m.) with reaction from Taylor & Francis Group.]
The editor and the entire editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration have resigned in response to a conflict with the journal’s publisher over an author agreement that they say is “too restrictive and out of step with the expectations of authors.”
The licensing terms set by the publisher, Taylor & Francis Group, were scaring away potential authors, the editor who resigned, Damon Jaggars, told The Chronicle.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, Tracy Roberts, the editorial director of journals at Taylor & Francis, defended the journal’s policies. “The current publishing environment around licensing and author rights is continually evolving. We consider ourselves to be a forward-looking Publisher on author rights,” Ms. Roberts said. “Our License grants significant reuse rights to authors …
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March 11, 2013, 3:47 pm
By Jennifer Howard
The American Anthropological Association publishes more than 20 journals. None is open access. The public currently has to wait 35 years after publication to have free access to articles, according to a spokeswoman for the group.
That will change early next year, when the journal Cultural Anthropology switches over to a fully open-access model. The Society for Cultural Anthropology, a section of the association, runs the journal.
“Starting with the first issue of 2014, CA will provide worldwide, instant, free (to the user), and permanent access to all of our content (as well as 10 years of our back catalog),” Brad Weiss, the society’s president, said in a statement posted on the group’s Web site. He said that “Cultural Anthropology will be the first major, established, high-impact journal in anthropology to offer open access to all of its research” and that the society hopes the …
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March 11, 2013, 2:52 pm
By Jake New
Universities and foundations have poured more than $100-million into creating open-education materials. But according to David Wiley, an open-education advocate for 15 years, faculty members and administrators have been slow to use the resources as alternatives to expensive textbooks.
“It’s frustrating to watch these resources keep getting created, and then watch nobody use them and watch students get no benefit,” he said.
So Mr. Wiley helped found Lumen Learning, a new company that will offer guidance and support to institutions looking to use those resources. One of the company’s goals is to collaborate with colleges to develop an associate degree in business administration that can be completed entirely with free open-education materials.
Colleges following what the company calls the Textbook Zero model would offer a section using open-education alternatives for every…
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March 8, 2013, 3:54 pm
By Jake New
A free-textbook company that was sued last year by three major textbook publishers has now rewritten the content it was accused of stealing.
Pearson, Cengage Learning, and Macmillan Higher Education filed a joint complaint in March 2012 against the company, known as Boundless. The publishers asserted that the way Boundless creates its textbooks violates their copyrights. In a process called “alignment,” students select the traditional text they need, and Boundless pulls together open content to create free versions of the books.
The publishers say the resulting products too closely mirror the original texts, specifically the way the new books are organized. Matt Oppenheim, a lawyer representing the publishers, said Boundless was simply stealing the substance of his clients’ textbooks.
“They were stripping out the entirety of a book’s structure and organization, topic by to…
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February 11, 2013, 4:55 am
By Jennifer Howard
Washington — Scholarly publishers that want to flourish in the 21st century can’t just keep producing content and selling it to customers. They have to understand how those “end users” work and come up with solutions to help them do their work better.
That advice dominated the annual meeting of the Association of American Publishers’ Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, which concluded here on Friday. The meeting brings together commercial academic publishers, including Elsevier and John Wiley & Sons, some of the larger university presses, and scholarly associations with significant publishing programs, like the American Chemical Society and the American Psychological Association.
“If we’re going to sustain ourselves, we can’t just continue to take what our authors deliver to us and provide publishing services,” Steve Smith, Wiley’s president and chief executive…
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February 8, 2013, 3:00 pm
By Jake New
In September 2010, Dale Askey, now a librarian at McMaster University, in Ontario, published a blog post titled “The Curious Case of Edwin Mellen Press,” in which he called the Edwin Mellen Press “a dubious publisher.” For a few months afterward, several people chimed in in the blog’s comments section, some agreeing with Mr. Askey, some arguing in support of the American publisher.
In June 2012, Edwin Mellen Press’s founder, Herbert Richardson, issued a notice of action to Mr. Askey, suing him for more than $1-million. That same day, the press issued a similar notice of action to Mr. Askey and McMaster University, telling them that they were being sued for libel and seeking damages of $3-million.
The lawsuit, filed in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, came to light this week when Leslie Green, a philosophy-of-law professor at the University of Oxford, mentioned the…
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January 9, 2013, 5:00 am
By Jeffrey R. Young
Some producers of free e-textbooks have had trouble persuading professors to adopt them. So one backer of “open-source textbooks” has decided to sell its titles on Chegg, an online textbook retailer, for a small fee in hopes of reaching a wider audience.
The group is called the Twenty Million Minds Foundation, and its goal is to save students money by creating e-textbooks for popular subjects and making them available free—or as close to free as possible. It has spent about $1.5-million developing a handful of textbooks written by high-profile scholars.
But its leaders admit that professors have been slow to assign the books in their courses. Few professors have heard of the Twenty Million Minds Foundation or of OpenStax College, the Rice University-run service that hosts the free textbooks produced by the foundation.
“When you’re a foundation and you approach a professor,…
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