Public Knowledge's Alex Curtis has written a useful section-by-section analysis of the Intellectual Property Enforcement Act of 2007.
Amazon has launched Kindle, its e-book reader.
Here's a selection of articles and postings:
The Center for History and New Media has launched ScholarPress, which provides WordPress plugins tailored for educational use.
The first two plugins are:
The Eduserv Foundation has released Snapshot Study on the Use of Open Content Licences in the UK Cultural Heritage Sector (Appendices).
Here's an excerpt from the "Executive Summary":
This study investigates the awareness and use of open content licences in the UK cultural heritage community by way of a survey. Open content licensing generally grants a wide range of permission in copyright for use and re-use of works such as images, sounds, video, and text, whilst retaining a relatively small set of rights: often described as a ‘some rights reserved’ approach to copyright. For those wishing to share content using this model, Creative Archive (CA) and Creative Commons (CC) represent the two main sets of open content licences available for use in the United Kingdom.
The year of this survey, 2007, marks five years from the launch of the Creative Commons licences, two years since the launch of the UK-specific CC licences and two years as well since the launch of the UK-only Creative Archive licence.
This survey targeted UK cultural heritage organisations—primarily museums, libraries, galleries, archives, and those in the media community that conduct heritage activities (such as TV and radio broadcasters and film societies). In particular, this community produces trusted and highly valued content greatly desired by the general public and the research and education sectors. They are therefore a critical source of high-demand content and thus the focus for this project. The key objective has been to get a snapshot of current licensing practices in this area in 2007 for use by the sector and funding bodies wishing to do more work in this area.
Over 100 organisations responded to this web-based survey. Of these respondents:
- Only 4 respondents out of 107 indicated that they held content but were not making it available online nor had plans to make it available online;
- Images and text are the two content types most likely to be made available online;
- Sound appears to be the most held content type not currently available online and with no plans to make it available in the future;
- Many make some part of their collection available online without having done any formal analysis of the impact this may have;
- 59 respondents were aware of Creative Archive or Creative Commons;
- 10 use a CA or CC licence for some of their content; and
- 12 have plans to use a CA or CC licence in the future.
By two votes, the House failed to override President Bush's veto of the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2008, which contained the NIH open access mandate (the vote was 277-141). Bloomberg reports that Senate Democrats have a new strategy:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Democrats will combine the 11 unfinished appropriations bills still needed to fund the federal government into one measure that exceeds the administration's request by $11 billion—half the $22 billion Democrats initially supported.
However, CQPolitics reports that:
The White House brushed off Reid’s proposal Thursday, as administration officials have done previously when Democrats have said they are willing to negotiate on funding levels.
"The president has been clear that Congress should adhere to the budgetary process and pass individual funding bills at reasonable and responsible spending levels," said Sean Kevelighan, a spokesman for the White House budget office. "Perhaps [the] Democratic leadership in Congress. . . should concern itself less with capturing political news cycles and more on their fundamental responsibility to fund the federal government."
Peter Suber had this to say about the override failure:
OK, on to Plan B. The OA mandate for the NIH is a small part of a big bill to pay for about one-thirteenth of the federal government. Some version of the appropriation will certainly pass and get the President's signature. You can already see the jockeying between Congressional leaders and the White House about the contours of that version. There are four grounds for optimism:
- The OA mandate was approved by both houses of Congress. The easiest provisions to delete are those approved by just one chamber and kept by the House-Senate conference committee.
- The OA mandate has bipartisan support in Congress and Republican friends in the Executive Branch.
- The President has expressed strong objection to some of the policy provisions of the bill, but his stated concern about the OA provision is very mild by comparison. If Congress deletes some of the more sensitive provisions in the spirit of compromise, it needn't touch the OA mandate. In fact, deleting the OA provision would do virtually nothing to ingratiate the President.
- To reduce overall spending levels in the bill, Congress will cut some of the appropriations. But the OA mandate is a policy change, not an appropriation. There's no need to cut it to satisfy the President's fiscal objections to the current bill. Stay tuned.
Despite the opposition of higher education officials, the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007 was approved by the House Education and Labor Committee with an illegal file sharing provision intact.
Read more about the provision and its approval at "Campus Copyright Mandates Threaten Financial Aid Funds and Campus Networks," "House Antipiracy Measure Passes through Committee," "House Committee on Education and Labor Puts out 'Supporters of Intellectual Property Theft' Propaganda," "Politicos Near Vote on Anti-P2P Rules for Universities," and "Swiftboating Higher Education on P2P."
Preprints on university publishing from a special double issue of ARL: A Bimonthly Report on Research Library Issues and Actions from ARL, CNI, and SPARC are now available.