Wired Campus Blog asks,

Are e-books and Google Print threatening libraries or energizing them?

As information specialists, librarians are going to be needed more and more for helping us with research and obtaining hard to find texts. As for the library collections, I doubt that e-books and/or Google Print are even close to as much of a threat to libraries as Elsevier and other academic journal publishers who are putting the screws to library budgets and and thus their collections. In fact, Google Print should help to expand access to texts while such publishers work so hard to limit access.

I posted about Wink already over on datacloud, but I thought it worth mentioning here as I see it as very useful for creating tutorials for DrupalEd/DrupalBlog and for Purdue's English 421 documentation project.

Academic Journals With CC Licenses - By way of the Creative Commons weblog come two journals that are publishing under Creative Commons licenses: Classics @ and The Stanford Undergraduate Research Journal. Both are using the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license; I'm especially pleased that they are allowing derivative works, and I hope more journals and other academic enterprises heed the call of this model. Allowing derivative works is good--doing so will only enrich the original work, not compromise it. Come on in; the water's fine. [Posted by Clancy at Kairosnews]

On Friday, March 26, at the Conference for College Composition and Communication in San Antonio, I'll be presenting on "Weblogs as a Personal Knowledge Publishing Tool for Scholars and Practitioners." The presentation is largely built on my experience and observations about other weblogs, Seb Paquet's initial article on the subject, and some ideas from Torill Mortensen and Jill Walker's Blogging thoughts: personal publication as an online research tool.

Rather than using power point, I've put a version up online which I will continue to revise over the next few days. We'll have Internet access during the presentation, so I'll be working directly from the text as displayed. I also think that this presentation will be an introduction for many considering using weblogs for the first time, so I would welcome any feedback so as to make this a good experience for all. Feel free to register and post comments.

Besides, for a presentation on personal knowledge publishing, I ought to eat my own dog food. ;)

For those that still aren't convinced of the importance of the Open Access movement, read Simon Caulkin's article in today's Guardian Observer (link courtesy of Open Access News). Caulkin's article succinctly pulls the major points of the open access debate together. For example, as he points out quite clearly,

How's this for a winning publishing formula? A university funds scientific research; the research is turned into a paper by an author, who pays a colour illustration and reprint charge - say, £1,000 - and surrenders the copyright for the privilege of publishing his findings in a specialised journal. Peers review the work for free, then the publisher prints the article - and sells it back for a hefty fee to the institution where the work was carried out in the first place.

. . . .

Over the past two years, protests at the unfairness of the current system have mounted. Having paid once to produce new scientific knowledge, funding agencies and scientists argue, why should taxpayers and charitable bodies have to pay again to use it?