Who Profits When You Publish?

The recent strike of the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) raised an important issue for academic writers. Although their compensation and job security differ, WGA members and academics both are creators of knowledge and culture. What should be the relationship between such creators and profit?

An OA policy for Macquarie University

Macquarie University has adopted an OA policy.  From today's announcement:
Research conducted by Macquarie University experts will soon be freely available to anyone with access to the internet, following a unanimous decision by the Macquarie University Council last night.

The Case for Open Access to Public Sector Data

Government institutions and other public organizations gather a lot of data. Some of them - like the Statistics Office - have it as their main purpose, others as a part of their function, and yet others almost as a by-product of their day-to-day operations.
In this case I’m mainly talking about structured data, i.e. statistics, databases, indexed registries and the like - in short, anything that could logically be represented in table format. This includes a variety of data, ranging from the federal budget and population statistics to dictionary words, weather observations and geographical coordinates of street addresses - to name just a few examples.

US Court Finds Open Source Licences Enforceable; Big Impact Seen On US Copyright Law

By Steven Seidenberg for Intellectual Property Watch
The ruling has no precedential value. Nevertheless, the recent decision in Jacobsen v. Katzer will have a major impact on US copyright law, according to IP experts.

Ithaka’s 2008 report on its 2006 faculty and librarian surveys

.Although open access and increasing access to research in the developing world have been topics of substantial interest in our community, it is still the case that faculty decisions about where and how to publish the results of their research are principally based on the visibility within their field of a particular option. Faculty are most interested in publishing in journals with wide circulation and reading, and are far less interested in issues such as whether the journal is available for free to the general public or accessible to the developing world (see Figure 15). For the most part, these priorities are stable across disciplines and institutional sizes, except for a few minor variations – faculty at larger schools are somewhat more concerned with the selectiveness of the journals they publish in, and scientists are less concerned with the potential need to pay to publish in the journal, differences easily explained by the particulars of their environments.

A Big Win For Copyright On The Internet

Judge rules that copyright owners must take “fair use” into consideration before sending DMCA copyright notices.

In a major win for ordinary people on the Internet, a California US District Court Judge held that copyright holders must take “fair use”
 into consideration
 before issuing DMCA take-down notices (here’s the ruling (10-page PDF))

Open Source approach to textbook publishing

Textbooks have long made up an all-too-significant proportion of college students' annual costs,
currently approaching an average of USD 1,000 per year in the US, according to Make Textbooks Affordable.
General outcry has ensued, but a new experiment from publisher Flat World Knowledge just may provide a new—and ad-free—solution.

Collapse of WTO talks likely to trigger more FTAs

Panel Shows Flaws In Global IP Enforcement Push, Especially For Developing Countries

Microsoft Research Unveils Free Software Tools to Help Scholars and Researchers Share Knowledge