We librarians cannot stand by and do nothing while some publishers deepen the digital divide. We cannot wait passively while some publishers deny access to our cultural record. We must speak out on behalf of today’s – and tomorrow’s – readers. The library community demands meaningful change and creative solutions that serve libraries and our readers who rightfully expect the same access to ebooks as they have to printed books.

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Link to the original post.

We write to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library. Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive. This situation is exacerbated by efforts of certain publishers (called “providers”) to acquire, bundle, and increase the pricing on journals.

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The Faculty Advisory Council to the Library, representing university faculty in all schools and in consultation with the Harvard Library leadership,  reached this conclusion: major periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published by historically key providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable. Doing so would seriously erode collection efforts in many other areas, already compromised.

More.

Link to the NYT article.

Link to Retraction Watch website.

The boycott group is called The Cost of Knowledge, and its Statement of Purpose is well worth checking out. A sample:

Many mathematicians have in recent years lost patience with being involved in a system in which commercial publishers make profits based on the free labor of mathematicians and subscription fees from their institutions’ libraries, for a service that has become largely unnecessary. Among all the commercial publishers, the behavior of Elsevier seemed to many to be the most egregious, and a number of mathematicians had made personal commitments to avoid any involvement with Elsevier journals.

Yesterday, Elsevier issued a response to the boycott, “A Letter to the Mathematics Community,” that lays out promises to lower some of its prices, create open-access plans for older content, and withdraw its support for the Research Works Act (an anti-democratic proposal to prevent U.S. taxpayer-funded research from becoming open-access). Whether these intentions pan out into long-term changes in the way that research is published and disseminated remains to be seen, but at the very least Elsevier has acknowledged problems with the current model of research publishing.

Link to the boycott website.

Link to Elsevier’s response.

Link to a CBC story.

Barnes & Noble is the last of the chain stores, and it seems to be a toss up whether it too will go out of business or mutate into some sort of book-less Internet cafe thing. Meanwhile, Amazon has cast its gaze on a new object of interest: the publishers themselves, what CEO Jeff Bezos refers to as the middleman in the book selling business. Shiver.

Just three publishers control 90% of the K-12 textbook market in the U.S., and they’ve each signed agreements with Apple.

Link to PopSci article.

How to make a textbook cover out of a brown paper bag.

We do what we can to revive such illustrations by removing common artifacts like dirt, water stains, and creases — a sort of clarification — but I admit there is an aesthetic argument against doing this: that an illustration’s weathered condition is part of its content. Typically, the research article in which the illustration appears does plenty to convey its time and place, and the better choice is clear presentation.

The Winter 2012 issue of ALR will include three illustrations, all accompanying Sarah T. Lahey’s article, “Honeybees and Discontented Workers: A Critique of Labor in Louisa May Alcott.” Here are the before and after versions of the illustrations. Too much? Not enough?

Link to the ALR web page.

As astonishing as it is to imagine someone systematically downloading millions of research articles in order to make them open-access, it is just as sobering to notice how even an exceptionally tech-savvy individual like Swartz could not maintain his online anonymity.

In response to Swartz’s high-profile apprehension, hacktavist Greg Maxwell uploaded 18,592 JSTOR articles to the Pirate Bay the next day, along with a signed statement of intent. All the articles came from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and were published prior to 1923, making them legally part of the public domain. Purchasing the articles through JSTOR would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

An excerpt of Maxwell’s statement, posted with the files:

All too often journals, galleries, and museums are becoming not disseminators of knowledge–as their lofty mission statements suggest–but censors of knowledge, because censoring is the one thing they do better than the Internet does. Stewardship and curation are valuable functions, but their value is negative when there is only one steward and one curator, whose judgment reigns supreme as the final word on what everyone else sees and knows. If their recommendations have value they can be heeded without the coercive abuse of copyright to silence competition.

Link to The Tech article.

Link to Maxwell’s statement about copyright.