I’m posting about a different story to make up for the fact that so many of us were outraged by the WSJ article last week and wrote about it. Here’s one for you, academic librarians!
Does anyone remember the days when, as an undergraduate, you had to purchase spiral-bound course packets from a commercial copying center? I do – it was expensive! Aren’t you glad we have e-reserves and Oncourse to make it so that you don’t have to go buy course packets? Well, there is case against Georgia State University that questions if offering free e-reserves is exactly legal by copyright law. All the money publishers used to make has evaporated with increased use of online resources, and oh, how they’ve noticed.
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This is one to watch. The staff that do e-reserves at the library where I work closely follow copyright law as interpreted by our resident copyright expert. I have wondered about the practices at universities without such an expert.
ReplyDeleteIt is unfortunate that ultimately the students are the one to truly suffer if Georgia State is to lose, either from increased class material costs or reduced quality or number of scholarly study materials.
I have always found scholarly publishing to be a racket. First, you convince students to pay a ton of money for content that they don't know anything about. Then convince the experts who create the content that they are already getting paid by their institutions and they should work hard to get this content published and barely get paid for it. Then, charge tons of money for the content and profit!
ReplyDeleteThis is why the open source movement is gaining such fast popularity among scholars, and why it is so important to students. Most of the time the creators of this content want it out there - the more people who see their work, the more people know their name - yet they are not the ones who make these decisions. It is a weird, irritating system.