The UC libraries let their Elsevier journal subscriptions lapse and now the publisher has cut their online access. It’s a painful milestone in the fight UC hopes may transform how journals get paid.
Libraries subscribe digitally to academic journals – and are left with nothing in the stacks when the contract expires.
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Digital publishing hasn’t resulted in the free and open access to information many envisioned. Universities are increasingly fed up with a system they see as charging them for their own scholars’ labor.
The scientific refereeing process can be tedious, time-consuming and isn’t very rewarding.
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The publishing giant Elsevier owns much of the world’s academic knowledge, in the form of article copyright. In the past few weeks it has stepped up enforcement of its property rights, issuing “take-down…
Library subscriptions to academic journals can cost up to $40,000 a year.
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Advocates of “open access” publishing in academia say a UK report that proposes spending £60 million a year to make all publicly-funded research free to access will protect the profits of publishers at…
Academic publishing firms have been all too keen to monopolise a crucial public good: academic knowledge.
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One of the great outrages of academia in the modern age is the privatisation of the profits accruing to publicly-financed knowledge. One form is that of academic journals, a primary method of disseminating…
Californian Republican Darrell Issa has dropped his support for a bill that would restrict free access to taxpayer-funded research.
AAP/Francis Specker
A controversial US bill that was designed to block access to vast amounts of academic research appears to have collapsed after its co-sponsors renounced their support for it. The Research Works Act, introduced…