In a first for US institutions, the University of California, the USA’s largest public university system, has decided to cancel its expensive subscription licence with Elsevier. The two organisations had evidently been negotiating for months, but talks finally failed over … Continue reading
Happy new year! Here’s an interesting bit of news to start off 2017. An article in Science magazine 6 Jan 2017 describes how hundreds of universities, technical schools and research institutes and public libraries in Germany will be starting the … Continue reading
I’ve posted several times on the open access movement which aims to end the practice of charging to read academic papers describing research which has usually been publicly funded in the first place. The latest case for open access is … Continue reading
A Happy New Year to you. Here’s to 2015, may the search continue! Oooh, that sounds a bit Star Wars-like, but there we are. As a friend once quoted Yoda to me: “do or do not, there is no try”, … Continue reading
This is an interesting move by Nature. The publishing group is enabling subscribers to share its articles without charge for others to read online. The initial paragraph stating that “all research papers from Nature will be made free to read … Continue reading
Further to my last post on What’s happening to the way we search for news?, below is the link, as promised, to my summary FreePint blog post: Is it worth paying for premium news sources? FreePint’s blog is worth keeping an … Continue reading
A new Charity Open Access Fund has been created by 6 medical organisations: Cancer Research UK, the British Heart Foundation, Arthritis Research UK, Breast Cancer Campaign, Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research and open access’s old friend, the Wellcome Trust, which is … Continue reading
I was recently asked by a colleague, for whom I’d been buying a number of academic papers, whether I was seeing much progress with open access. The costs were mounting, as he’d asked for quite a few and academic papers … Continue reading
Wow, it’s taken a while, but some helpful and long-called-for changes to copyright law have been made. It’s not really seen as an exciting topic of conversation (try introducing it at a party some time: “nice background music, good quality … Continue reading
It’s being widely reported in the media that Google has finally been given the green legal light to scan the world of books until it reaches the far horizon. It’s a lovely thought, and could be quite disruptive – a … Continue reading
