University of California Tries Just Saying No to Rising Journal Costs

U of California Tries Just Saying No to Rising Journal Costs
The Chronicle of Higher Education
By Jennifer Howard
June 10, 2010

The University of California system has said "enough" to the Nature Publishing Group, one of the leading commercial scientific publishers, over a big proposed jump in the cost of the group's journals.

On Tuesday, a letter http://libraries.ucsd.edu/collections/Nature_Faculty_Letter-June_2010.pdf
went out to all of the university's faculty members from the California Digital Library, which negotiates the system's deals with publishers, and the University Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication. The letter said that Nature proposed to raise the cost of California's license for its journals by 400 percent next year. If the publisher won't negotiate, the letter said, the system may have to take "more drastic actions" with the help of the faculty. Those actions could include suspending subscriptions to all of the Nature Group journals the California system buys access to-67 in all, including Nature.

The pressure does not stop there. The letter said that faculty would also organize "a systemwide boycott" of Nature's journals if the publisher does not relent. The voluntary boycott would "strongly encourage" researchers not to contribute papers to those journals or review manuscripts for them. It would urge them to resign from Nature's editorial boards and to encourage similar "sympathy actions" among colleagues outside the University of California system.

See the complete article at http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-California-Tries-Just/65823/.

CLIR Report: The Idea of Order: Transforming Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship]

The Idea of Order: Transforming Research Collections for 21st Century Scholarship
Council on Library and Information Resources Publication 147 (June 2010)

Part two of the report, "On the Cost of Keeping a Book" by Paul Courant and Matthew "Buzzy" Nielsen. is particularly interesting. Table on page 91 shows the costs for keeping a book forever. Worth thinking about in terms of shared print, digitization, etc.

Famopily by Karen Hammer

Art meets boardgame.




Famopily | 1999 | $800 until January 1, 2011, thereafter $1200

Ready to play board game: pigment inkjet prints, binder’s board

18.75 x 18.75"

Edition of 20
Family scrapbook images on game board, game cards collected by moving about board contain recollections about growing up in the 1960s.

Also available:
Famopily (codex), Inkjet prints | 1999 | $40
7.5 x 15.75" open | 7.5 x 8" closed
Wire bound book with text from game cards and photos from Famopily game board.

University of Washington MLIS Students

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_uzUh1VT98

UC Santa Cruz Students Protest Library Budget Cuts

Three-day study-in prompts mediation

April Boland -- Library Journal, 5/19/2010

• Police called in when students remained in library until midnight
• Library staff, caught in the middle, say protests create a “hardship"
• Facilitated dialogue helps end student action

More than 100 University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) students protested ongoing and projected library budget cuts (totaling about 10%) with a three-day "study-in" last week at the Science and Engineering Library.

The protest began Monday, May 10, when students occupied the library until midnight in violation of the building’s 10:30 p.m. closing time. The library was forced to close early at 4:30 p.m. May 11, leading protesters to study right outside of the building.

Michael P. Johnson, 2010 Vanderbilt Graduate

Michael P. Johnson 2010 Commencement from Vanderbilt University, May 14, 2010 with a Bachelor's Degree in Mechanical Engineering.

Copyright for Librarians

Copyright for Librarians is a joint project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL), a consortium of libraries from 50 countries in Africa, Asia and Europe. The goal of the project is to provide librarians in developing and transitional countries information concerning copyright law. More specifically, it aspires to inform librarians concerning:

• copyright law in general
• the aspects of copyright law that most affect libraries
• how librarians in the future could most effectively participate in the processes by which copyright law is interpreted and shaped.