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You have to learn to let go. The idea that books, magazines, databases or any form of information source can and should be kept for perpetuity is laughable. Items in a library need to be weeded and space is the major reason why. I know all of you want to keep your precious books, and I do to. But who’s going to pay for it, you?... — the other me

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June 29, 2009

U. of Kansas to Make Research Available Free Online

The University of Kansas will make more of its faculty research free to the public online.

“The University of Kansas has been interested in reforming what has been kind of a dysfunctional system of scholarly communication for years,” said Ada Emmett, an associate librarian at the university. “People fundamentally agree with providing the widest possible access to our scholarship.”

The university already has over 4,400 articles in its digital repository of scholarly work, ScholarWorks, which was opened in 2005. Any new research will be added to that collection, and Ms. Emmett estimated that anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 articles are published by the university each year. She will oversee a task force to administer the program. The plan has not yet been finalized, but she hopes it will be in place by next year.

After Harvard University passed a similar plan last February, faculty members at the University of Kansas began to research how they could adopt one.

In April the University of Maryland rejected a plan to allow for open access to its research journals. Peter Suber, a research professor of philosophy at Earlham College and a longtime promoter of open access to scholarly publishing, wrote that the reason many of the faculty voted against the plan was because they feared that the policy would limit the freedom of professors to submit work to journals, or that it would harm subscriptions to other journals, and that there was no specified opt-out clause. The University of Maryland’s proposal was not a mandate, but a suggestion.

“Ironically, because the Maryland policy mandated nothing, there was no need to build in a waiver provision,” Mr. Suber wrote. “Hence, no one could point to an explicit waiver option to answer fears that encouragement might harden into an expectation.”

A. Townsend Peterson, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas, said that similar issues arose there but that after the faculty members were able to ask questions of the university senate, their fears of publishing restrictions were dispelled. Faculty members can request a waiver if they do not want their work to be used, he said.

“Anybody who is in academia should be aware of and concerned about the commercialization of academic publication,” Mr. Peterson said. “Academic communication should not be about typing in your credit-card number. It should be something we’re trying to share globally.”—Marc Beja

June 23, 2009

'Twitterature': Tweeting Classics on the Web

It isn’t uncommon to find literature rendered in the style of Twitter’s trademarked 140-character blasts. But it’s rare for such tweets to make their way into print.

Yet that’s the concept behind a new book penned by two rising University of Chicago sophomores, titled Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books, Now Presented in Twenty Tweets or Less. The project’s Web site calls it “a humorous retelling of works of great literature in Twitter format.”

Emmet Rensin and Alex Aciman, who both just completed their freshman years at the university, pitched the project to Penguin Publishing. The book is scheduled to be released this fall.

Mr. Rensin and Mr. Aciman say on their site that combining classic literature and young technology “is the perfect remedy and counterbalance to the esoteric texts, which are still so vital to us—and to our GPA.”

Both students plan to work on the project this summer, though no updates have been added to their site. A Chronicle search of Twitter yielded an account for Mr. Rensin, but not one for Mr. Aciman or for the project itself. Neither could be reached for comment.

According to the site, both students have experience in writing and publishing. Mr. Aciman has worked for The Paris Review and the late New York Sun, and has also written essays for The New York Times. Mr. Rensin—whose father, David Rensin, has written five Times bestsellers—has contributed to The Huffington Post and is also an ordained reverend. Both say they hope to be writers. —Erica R. Hendry

June 18, 2009

Indiana U. Press Releases Titles on the Web

Scholars, researchers, and students are now just clicks away from some of the most popular titles released by the Indiana University Press.

With the launch of IU Press Online, anyone with an Internet connection can read sections of books and themed journals for free and purchase full-text versions at a discounted price.

“It speaks to our mission to disseminate scholarship as widely as we can,” said Kathryn Caras, director of electronic and serials publishing.

The online portal is in its infancy, but it already offers more than 200 books and 75 themed journals from five subject areas: African studies; African-American and diaspora studies; Jewish and Holocaust studies; philosophy; and Russian, East European and Eurasian studies. The press plans to add books about music and religious studies over the summer. Ms. Caras said all the press’s titles will eventually show up on the site.

The press has made most books’ tables of contents free, along with their first chapters or introductions, Ms. Caras said. Users can purchase the full text of individual articles or subscribe to individual collections, groups of collections, or the entire library.

The material can also be accessed with handheld mobile devices like the iPhone. And users can bookmark, cite, or share documents on sites like Delicious and Digg, or subscribe to an RSS feed that gives updates when content is added.

“It speaks to the change in our market,” Ms. Caras said. —Erica R. Hendry

June 15, 2009

Student Beats Cheating Charges for Posting Work Online

A student majoring in computer science at San Jose State University said he fought against a professor who had tried to force him to remove his homework from the Internet, and won.

On his blog, Kyle Brady explained that he had posted his computer code assignments online after the due date, in an attempt to help others and serve as a reference for future employment. But Mr. Brady says his professor, Michael Beeson, demanded he remove the content, or he would fail the course for breaking the university’s policies for cheating. Mr. Brady said the professor said students in the future would be explicitly forbidden from publishing their work in other courses. Professor Beeson did not respond to messages requesting comment.

“It was not my intention to help others cheat or facilitate it. In fact, I still don’t believe this could be considered cheating, since it is a very different situation than passing a Final around the room,” Mr. Brady said he wrote in an e-mail to his professor. “There is no reason to not make homework solutions public at an appropriate time, and what I have done is no different than sharing answers after they have been turned in for grading – or reviewing graded homeworks in groups before a Final Exam. I merely used the Internet as my distribution method, instead of a paper-and-ink solution.”

After several e-mail messages were exchanged between them, Mr. Brady said, he was informed on June 3 that he would not be punished by the university for his actions.

“I have now heard from Debra Griffith, Judicial Affairs Officer of SJSU, and she agrees that what you have done does not in any way constitute a violation of the University Academic Integrity Policy, and that Dr. Beeson cannot claim otherwise,” Mr. Brady said his department chairperson wrote him in an e-mail.

On his blog, Mr. Brady triumphantly wrote, “Thanks to some perseverance and asking the right questions, SJSU Professors are now prohibited from barring students from posting their code solutions online, as well as penalizing their students for doing so.” —Marc Beja

June 9, 2009

Considering Electronic Textbooks? Beware the Learning Curve

Northwest Missouri State University’s experiment with e-textbooks has yielded half a dozen lessons and some surprises. The latest installment of The Chronicle’s College 2.0 column outlines what the university learned in its experiment using various forms of electronic textbooks in several courses this academic year.

One surprise: Students and professors have to learn how to use the newfangled textbooks. “I mean, you can easily read it, but if you want to highlight or enlarge the text or share your notes with other people,” you have to learn to do that, said Tania Brobst, a junior at the university. Initially skeptical, she now says she prefers the electronic version in part because of its search feature and the ability to paste passages into a Microsoft Word document for note taking. But other students surveyed said they still prefer print.

Have any of you tried e-books in your courses? Share your lessons in the comments.

June 5, 2009

10 University-Press Directors Back Free Access to Scholarly Articles

In a move that puts them at odds with the official stance of the Association of American University Presses, a group of university-press directors yesterday issued a position statement that endorses “the free access to scientific, technical, and medical journal articles no later than 12 months after publication.”

The statement was signed by the directors of a group of small and medium-size presses, including Penn State University, Rockefeller University Press, the University of Michigan Press, and the University Press of New England. It was posted on Peter Suber’s Open Access News blog.

“The signatories think that it is important to publicly align ourselves with the stance taken by many university faculties and administrators on scholarly communication,” Mike Rossner, the Rockefeller press’s director, told The Chronicle by e-mail on Wednesday. His press makes its content publicly available six months after publication, he said, “and our revenues have increased every year since then.” That experience has led his press to conclude that “providing public access to scholarly-journal articles after a short delay is compatible with our subscription-based business model.”

Mr. Rossner added that his press supports legislation, such as a requirement touching research backed by the National Institutes of Health, that promotes open access. That public-access mandate has come under threat from a bill, the Fair Use in Research Works Act, that’s sponsored by Rep. John Conyers Jr., a Democrat of Michigan. The bill was tabled in the last session of Congress and reintroduced by Mr. Conyers in the current session. The press association and the Association of American Publishers have expressed support for the legislation.

The 10 press directors who signed yesterday’s statement did not refer to the Conyers bill by name. “We support the principle that scholarly research fully funded by governmental entities is a public good and should be treated as such,” they wrote. “We support legislation that strengthens this principle and oppose legislation designed to weaken it.”

Although the statement will gladden the hearts of open-access advocates, the signers represent only a fraction of the press association’s members, and it’s hard to tell what impact their action might have. In a telephone conversation with The Chronicle yesterday, Peter J. Givler, the association’s executive director, said that its executive board had polled the membership recently and found that a majority still agreed with the group’s take on the issue.

He noted that individual presses had the liberty to set their own course. “It’s a free country,” Mr. Givler said. —Jennifer Howard

May 15, 2009

Blog vs. Peer Review Final Report: Lessons Learned

Last year Noah Wardrip-Fruin, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of California at Santa Cruz, ran an experiment with his latest academic book: He let readers of a popular blog to which he contributes peer review the book in public. This week he shared his final conclusions about the strengths and weaknesses of his unusual approach.

The book’s publisher, MIT Press, administered a traditional peer review of the book, and Mr. Wardrip-Fruin was able to compare the two approaches. One major difference: Blog commenters tended to focus on discrete paragraphs and points, and rarely compared ideas in one chapter to those later in the work. But the blog readers offered more detailed input than the anonymous reviewers solicited by the press.

Mr. Wardrip-Fruin argues that blog reviewing works and that it should be tried again in the future. “Of course, widely read blogs won’t want to be completely taken over by manuscript review,” he writes. “But I can imagine them hosting two or three a year, selected for their level of interest or because they are written by one of the blog’s authors.” —Jeffrey R. Young

May 6, 2009

Amazon's New Kindle Is Unveiled in Hopes of Capturing the Textbook Market

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 the announcement’s possible impact this morning in an article in The Chronicle’s online edition.

What’s in it for the universities? Case Western’s president, Barbara R. Snyder, said concern over the high price of printed textbooks was a primary motivation (electronic versions of textbooks are typically half the price of their printed counterparts). “Our students are definitely interested in learning of ways to reduce the cost of what they have to pay for their course materials,” she said. But will buying a $489 device lead to savings? “You have to look at the total cost over the course of four years,” she said. The university plans to give Kindles to about 40 students in three courses, and give an equal number of students paper books as a control group to see which group reports a better experience.

For Princeton, the goal is to save paper — and therefore trees. “Over 10 million pages were printed last year by students” in campus computer labs, said Serge J. Goldstein, associate CIO and director of academic services at Princeton. He said that as the university has made more library books available on electronic reserve, paper usage has soared. The hope is that the Kindle, which uses a different kind of screen designed to be easier on the eyes, will lead more students to read on the screen rather than hitting “print.” Princeton’s pilot will involve three courses with about 50 students total. Princeton’s project is expected to cost about $60,000, with the university paying half and Amazon picking up the rest of the tab, said Mr. Goldstein.

College officials first volunteered for the project back in the fall of 2007, at a meeting with Amazon officials during the annual conference of Educause, the higher-education-technology group. “They approached a number of universities and were interested in how they could take their current device, the Kindle 1, and make it responsive” to the college market, said Mr. Goldstein. He said he and other officials offered some suggestions — including making the screen bigger — and were eventually invited to participate in a pilot project with the new devices. —Jeffrey R. Young

April 29, 2009

Snags Hit Google Settlement With Authors and Publishers, and Antitrust Worries Rise

It’s beginning to feel like Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the case in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House that drags on, and on, and on. As speculation grows about the impact that the Google Book Search settlement will have on readers and publishers — will it result in a universal library or a worrisome monopoly? — an actual resolution of the case continues to recede in the distance.

In the latest delay, reported by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, the federal judge in charge of the proceedings responded to authors’ pleas by giving them an extra four months to opt out of the settlement. They now have until September to take that step. The judge, Denny Chin, also bumped the date for a final hearing on the settlement from June to October.

Another piece of news threw the future of the settlement into greater doubt. The Justice Department has taken an interest in the agreement too. It wants to know whether the deal violates antitrust regulations, the Times reported yesterday.

“Lawyers for the Justice Department have been in conversations in recent weeks with various groups opposed to the settlement, including the Internet Archive and Consumer Watchdog,” the Times reported. “More recently, Justice Department lawyers notified the parties to the settlement, including Google, and representatives for the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild, that they were looking into various antitrust issues related to the far-reaching agreement.”

The federal interest in the case doesn’t necessarily doom the deal, the Times noted. But it “suggests that some of the concerns raised by critics, who say the settlement would unfairly give Google an exclusive license to profit from millions of books, have resonated with the Justice Department.” —Jennifer Howard

April 22, 2009

Law Reviews Create Web Magazine Offering Condensed Articles

Lawyers study for years to develop the patience to wade through dense legal tomes on such topics as the “takings clause,” but what about the rest of us?

A coalition of publications at a handful of prestigious law schools is looking out for curious laypersons who might be interested in the debate over intentionalist and textualist interpretations of the law, but don’t have the time to wrestle with a 78-page document brimming with footnotes and legalese. The new online magazine The Legal Workshop offers visitors the chance to browse brief summaries of articles appearing in the influential law reviews (composed by the authors of those articles), written in plain language.

The idea is to open up the content of law reviews to a wider audience and to make legal debates influential and relevant beyond academic cloisters. “As a profession,” Michael Montano, an editor of the Stanford Law Review, told the Web site Legal Blog Watch, “we owe it to the public to produce work that is relevant to society as a whole.” –Steve Kolowich

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