The Kept-Up Academic Librarian summarizes recent developments in academia from a wide range of sources (NYT, Chronicle, Educause, etc.), covering issues such as instruction, tenure, endowments, because we need more than one source to tell us what’s going on. (Source: Library Stuff)
I always enjoy reading LLRX.com, a monthly web publication. Though it’s focus is on law libraries and legal information, many articles are of interest to the general reader. A column from this month discusses which federal agencies are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. The Grammar Goddess is frequently full of surprises and good reminders. The feature reviews legal sources on the Children’s Internet Protection Act. Other issues have featured varied topics such as airlines, personal technology and presentations. (Thanks to beSpacific)
A Chronicle of Higher Education article (access restricted to subscribers) reports on problems faced by female graduate students and researchers in physics labs, particularly at Duke University. A colloquy, “the Physics of gender bias” is scheduled for Wednesday, Jan. 21 at 1 PM EST on the Chronicle web site. (See also an earlier article in the Gazette reporting a study on women and minorities in the sciences.)
Coming to Boston is a five-day conference and trade show on nanotechnology including participation of dozens of universities, industry representatives and commerce. Harvard’s Charles Lieber is one of the keynote speakers. Session topics include nanodevices, biotechnology, drug design, among others. (Source: MIT’s Technology Review Friday Update)
(Abstract freely available. Harvard affiliates follow this link for full text.)A study published in PNAS last week examines insitutional site license subsscriptions to online journals and whether users benefit from such arrangements. They report: “If a journal is priced to maximize the publisher’s profits, scholars on average are likely to be worse off when universities purchase site licenses than they would be if access were by individual subscriptions only.” In contrast, university press and society journal site licenses benefit the scientific community because the subscription prices are closer to the costs of producing the journal. It’s also noted that some societies fund their activities with subscription monies and the scientific community also gains from these. In the latter instance, the university libraries play a key role negotiating and providing online access for users at their institutions. So for reasonably-priced journals, institutional access is a good per-capita value.
Harvard’s recent mass cancellation of Elsevier titles reflects problems with such pricing. At one point in the article, the authors point out that for a lot of journals the price reflects what users are (have been) willing to pay, rather than actual production costs.
The article does not address questions of open access.
It’s titled “Improbable Research- What’s New,” and has an RSS feed. Among other wonderful things, the transcript of Lene Hau’s Nano Lecture from the last Ig Nobel celebration is linked. (Source: Joho the Blog)
