The outgoing US President has signed a bill which creates a US Copyright Czar. See the PC Magazine report.
Bush signed the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO-IP) Act, a measure that will create several new government enforcement positions.
If it turns out that it is President Obama who is in fact charged with appointing this Czar, there must be a small chance that Laurance Lessig will fill the post. That would be an ironic turn of … Keep Reading
Is a phrase I dislike, almost as much as “leaving money on the table”. I tend to shudder when these phrases are used because bitter experience tells me that ‘low hanging fruit’ really only comes to us when we have put in a lot of effort. You need to be able to reach the fruit for it to be low-hanging: make sure that you are tall enough to reach it! Goose bumps from ‘money on the table’ for a slightly … Keep Reading
The Exact Editions platform is this week launching a customised shop for c. 50 titles from Gower, a leading publisher of high level business and management titles. The books can be searched for free, and interested parties can buy subscriptions with a credit card or their PayPal account. If you log in to the Gower shop you will find that there are 30 pages in these books which use the word “bubble”. It seems inevitable that bubbles are … Keep Reading
First there was Bloomsbury starting an Open Access academic publishing programme for monographs. Now we see that Springer is buying up BioMed Central, which publishes nearly 200 open access scientific journals. See Peter Suber’s comments on this.
I am sure that Springer are not intending to close down BMC (well 95% sure!). I agree with Suber that the really interesting aspect to this acquisition is that the big commercial publishers are now begining to feel their way into a … Keep Reading
It will soon be the first anniversary of our Institutional Shop, which we announced in November 2007. Institutional sales still form a relatively small proportion of our sale of subscriptions, but they have been an encouraging source of new business.
The system for making an institutional sale is completely automated, and web based. A number of institutions have bought their subscriptions and setup their IP-address based accounts with no intervention or action on our part. We knew that university … Keep Reading
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