Digital revolution threatens future of radical magazines
(islingtontribune.com): A RADICAL bookshop in Islington is launching a campaign to save Britain’s struggling small independent printed magazines. Titles including The Ecologist, Pink Paper, Lobster and most recently a short story magazine, Smoke: a London Peculiar, have disappeared from shelves, giving up on print and publishing solely online. Read More
A Library Without Walls
(nybooks.com): Can we create a National Digital Library? That is, a comprehensive library of digitized books that will be easily accessible to the general public. Simple as it sounds, the question is extraordinarily complex. It involves issues that concern the nature of the library to be built, the technological difficulties… Read More
Long Road to Open Access
(insidehighered.com): It has been more than a year since five leading research universities agreed to establish “timely” mechanisms for paying the publication fees for faculty who decide to publish in open-access journals. The goal is to eventually lure journals away from a subscriber-based model that limits access to articles and… Read More
Scientific misconduct and skepticgate
(sciblogs.co.nz): Plagiarism is the use of text from others’ writing without attribution. This was a big issue for student assessment at universities but apparently it is also an issue for scientific journals. Many journals now use a computer programme to check out submitted papers for plagiarized content.. Read More
Ebook popularity has publishers fearing ‘Napster moment’
(thespec.com): Scores of readers have embraced devices like Kindles and iPads, but their new-found popularity has also brought about concerns that e-books are having a “Napster moment.” Google searches for illegal downloads are up 50 per cent in the last year. Publishers hope to appeal to readers to make the… Read More
Drug firms ‘must publish all data’
(google.com): Drug companies should be forced to publish all their trial data rather than selecting evidence to back up their claims, experts have said. A review of clinical trial results for the anti-depressant Edronax (reboxetine) showed pharmaceutical firms did not publish most of the data for the drug. Read More
EBooks: Will Technology Kill Book Publishing?
(huffingtonpost.com): There has been much talk about the decline, and some say inevitable death, of the publishing industry as we know it today. Central to this argument are the rise of e-book sales and the increasing options available to authors to self-publish. Read More
Apple’s iPad is good for Amazon’s Kindle, which has 76% of eBooks market, says Cowen report
(latimesblogs.latimes.com): When Apple unveiled its iPad in January with its full-color high-resolution glory, many assumed it would be end of story for Amazon.com's Kindle book store and its black-and-white reader. Turns out the iPad has actually helped Amazon. Not only are sales of the Kindle device expected to grow 140%… Read More
E-Pub for academics
(wired.com): The impact of new technologies on publishing is inescapable, from e-readers like the Kindle to new platforms like the iPad, printing-on-demand to the growth of electronic libraries. There has been much discussion within the scholarly community about the transformations of journals and textbooks, but less about those two mainstays… Read More
‘Balance must be struck’ in copyright laws, says Creative Commons founder
(dailystar.com.lb): The Creative Commons founder, who is also the director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center of Ethics at Harvard University discussed ways that his organization has been able to bridge a gap between the professional and the amateur when it comes to copyright licenses. Creative Commons enables the… Read More
