Transitions

Amazon, which made its name selling books online, is now entering the book-digitizing business.

Like Google and, more recently, Microsoft, Amazon will be making hundreds of thousands of digital copies of books available online through a deal with university libraries and a technology company.

But, unlike Google and Microsoft, Amazon will not limit people to reading the books online. Thanks to print-on-demand technology, readers will be able to buy hard copies of out-of-print books and have them shipped to their homes.

And Amazon will sell only books that are in the public domain or that libraries own the copyrights to, avoiding legal issues that have worried many librarians — and that have prompted publishers to sue Google for copyright infringement.

Read the article in it’s entirety at: http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/06/2007062206n.htm

Chronicle of Higher Education, 6/22/07

Congress should grant taxpayers free access to the medical studies they fund

July 27, 2007

Taxpayers pony up $28 billion annually for the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest source of funding for medical research. The payoff, in addition to the occasional spectacular breakthrough, is more than 60,000 published studies each year.

The first beneficiaries of that knowledge aren’t doctors or patients. They are the publishers of the journals that review, print and sell the results to subscribers. Your tax dollars may have financed the clinical trial of a new treatment regime for the rare disease you’ve contracted, but you’ll probably still have to pay to see the results.

Now, some lawmakers are trying to increase the public’s access to this research. In a new funding bill for the NIH, the House of Representatives required that the results of the studies the government funds must be made freely available online within 12 months of their publication.

Read the rest of the editorial at:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-nih27jul27,0,2419093.story?coll=la-opinion-leftrail

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.

Read more: http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2294

Related: Yale Blog announcement

The Wired Campus, Chronicle of Higher Education, 10 Aug 2007