There has been lots of discussion this week about Amazon's growing power. This NYT piece heralded Barnes and Noble, once the thing that was supposedly destroying book selling, as its saviour. And today, there was this post on the Authors Guild blog that compared the plight of publishers/authors to that of chicken growers. Here is …
Invasion of the Internet body Snatchers
If you have been musing about the misguided policies in SOPA and PIPA that generated protests, what do you make of misguided international governance of the Internet? This article in Politico raises an interesting possibility, that the ITU will assert itself into Internet governance, ostensibly to coordinate security and taxation across countries. As is well …
Google changes how it uses your data
Thursday morning, millions of Google users received an email about a change in the company’s privacy policy. Google does not seem to be collecting more information as a company. Instead the new policy makes it clear that Google, Google+, Gmail, and YouTube are owned by the same company, and providing data to one Google property …
Berkeley Electronic Press Closes up Journals
I realize that this would be the second 'scholarly publication access' post of the day but as I was writing the other one I was directed to a paper by Mark McCabe and Chris Snyder (here is what used to be the link). It was a paper published in the BE Press journal Economic Analysis …
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Elsevier's economic case is lacking
The proposed US Research Works Act (RWA) proposes to prohibit government funding agencies, such as the NIH, from doing things like its open access policy (enacted in 2005) requiring all publications from funded research to be placed in National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central database within 12 months of publication. Not surprisingly, some publishers, notably for-profit publishers, are supporting the …
Learning on speed
The biggest announcement in education, particularly digitized education, in January was … no, not that. Sure, Apple got lots of press and attention for its foray into textbook publishing but I think that was secondary to another announcement made a few weeks earlier on January 3rd. That was when the Khan Academy announced that Vi Hart would …
Sharing and ad revenue
Felix Salmon looks at new platforms that make sharing easy -- specifically, Tumblr and Pinterest. Reblogging, on Tumblr, is so easy that the vast majority of Tumblr sites actually create little or no original content: they just republish content from other people. That’s a wonderful thing, for two reasons. Firstly, it takes people who are …
How useful is peer review?
One of the themes in this week's blog discussion surrounding Paul Krugman's post on the subject was whether it is worth waiting around for peer review. As I’ve tried to explain, the notion of journals as gatekeepers was largely fictional even 25 years ago. And I have a somewhat jaundiced view of how the whole …
Taking the text out of textbooks
I've been on both sides of the textbook market. I've read them and I've written them. And at each point I have had to struggle to see where they come in the learning experience. And by stuggle I mean it was not obvious that one textbook fit all. They have worked well for students who …
Blogs and academic research: A timely story
The other day, Paul Krugman wrote about the reduced relevance of formal academic publication given the nature of web distribution and discourse. It just so happens that today marks the completion of a personal story of mine that illustrates how blog discussion can lead to published academic research. However, it also demonstrates Krugman's main point …
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Digitopoly 