Postings will resume on 7/7/08.

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, e-prints, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.

Inside Higher Ed has published "Digital Daze," in which Scott McLemee reports on the 2008 Association of American University Presses Annual Meeting.

Sue Havlish's (Vanderbilt University Press) comment on University Publishing In A Digital Age seemed to sum up the tone of the meeting regarding new publishing models:

The report's proposal of a comprehensive new publishing platform "is the 800 pound gorilla in the room," she said. "Nobody wants to look at the gorilla because we’re all scared of it. Some librarians think that putting a text in a repository is 'publishing' it. There’s a fear of our role as publishers being subsumed by the libraries. But I still want—and I think most people still want—a book that been edited, that’s been shaped into something and marketed to me by a publisher that I’ve heard of already."

Presentations from the LIFE² Conference are now available.

LIFE² is the second phase of the LIFE project, which the below excerpt from the project's home page explains:

LIFE (Life Cycle Information for E-Literature) is a project looking at the life cycle of the collection and preservation of digital material. The project is a collaboration between University College London (UCL) Library Services and the British Library and funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).

The Open Access to Knowledge Law Project has published Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide for Authors.

Here's an excerpt:

This guide aims to provide practical guidance for academic authors interested in making their work more openly accessible to readers and other researchers.

The guide explains, in detail, the principles and features of the open access movement and outlines the benefits of open access, particularly those relating to dissemination, citation impact and academic reputation. It examines institutional repositories and open access journals as tools for implementing open access, and explains how they operate and how they can be best utilised by academic authors. The guide further considers how moves by funding bodies and academic institutions to mandate the deposit of research output into institutional repositories affects authors in today's publishing environment.

The underlying law of copyright is also explained, with a practical emphasis on how authors can best deal with their legal rights to enable open access to their academic work. The guide outlines authors' options for providing open access to their work, including the use of copyright licences and open content models such as Creative Commons licences. A Copyright Toolkit is provided to further assist authors in managing their copyright.

Importantly, the guide addresses how open access goals can affect an author's relationship with their commercial publisher. It provides guidance on how to negotiate a proper allocation of copyright interests between an author and publisher in order to allow an author to deposit their work into an institutional repository and reuse their work. The guide addresses both legal and non-legal issues related to maintaining a positive relationship with publishers while still ensuring that open access can be obtained.

The University of Michigan Library's MBooks project now offers user-created public collections of e-books.

In the future, Michigan plans to add MTagger functionality to MBooks.

Georgia State University's filing in copyright infringement suit the e-reserves copyright infringement suit brought against key GSU officials by three publishers is now available. It presents eighteen defenses, including sovereign immunity and fair use.

Read more about it at "Georgia State University Strongly Answers Publishers’ E-Reserve Lawsuit."