#meredith schwartz

[violettesiren]

Like a spider committing suicide

each night I unweave the web of my day.

I have no peace.

About me the insistent buzz of flies

drones louder every day.

I am starving.

I watch them, always, unblinking stare.

All my dwindling will

I use in not moving, not trying, unweaving.

I pull in my empty nets

eating myself, waiting.

Penelope to Ulysses By Meredith Schwartz

[stephenfrancoeur]

Pull quote: "Now that the HathiTrust verdict has held that digitizing works for the purpose of providing access to the blind and print-disabled is not only a fair but a transformative use, schools can feel safer hanging onto those scans until the next student who needs them comes along, and can spend their efforts on improving them or scanning more books, instead of doing the same bare minimum of texts over and over."

[stephenfrancoeur]

Pull quote: "The biggest challenge to library ebook lending may be simply letting patrons know they have any at all. Of the general population, the Pew study found 62 percent don’t even know whether they’re local library loans ebooks (75 percent of them do), and the picture doesn’t get much better for library card holders: 58 percent still don’t know whether their library lends ebooks or not."

[stephenfrancoeur]

Pull quote from Peter Suber: “It’s well-done. It doesn’t demand the author’s copyright. It doesn’t demand an embargo period. It doesn’t care whether authors deposit their peer-reviewed manuscripts in institutional or disciplinary repositories. It doesn’t make an exception for authors at institutions with OA mandates, or discriminate against authors and institutions who happen to want OA more than the publisher does. It’s a model for journal publishers in the humanities, who lag behind STM publishers in allowing green OA, and it’s a model for non-profit society publishers, who lag behind commercial publishers in allowing green OA."

[stephenfrancoeur]

Pull quote: "John Palfrey, Chair of the DPLA, said he hoped that this would encourage other institutions to make their own collection metadata publicly available. According to Harvard’s FAQ, other libraries that have already done so include 3 million records from the British Library, 5.4 million from Cologne libraries, 3.6 million from the University of Cambridge, and 8 million from OCLC’s OhioLINK–OCLC Collection and Circulation Analysis Project."

[stephenfrancoeur]

Pull quote: "Public Knowledge, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and U.S. PIRG, had filed an amicus brief asking the Court to review current case, on the grounds that, among other examples, 'Libraries, which rely heavily upon the first sale doctrine to lend copies of books to the public, are especially vulnerable under the Second Circuit’s stripped-down version of Section 109(a). Without the protection of Section 109(a) for foreign-printed books, libraries could be forced to affirmatively research the place of manufacture for every book they acquire, even if that acquisition is completed within the United States, and either refuse to stock foreign manufactured copies of books or seek countless licenses from copyright owners to offer those books to the public.'"

[stephenfrancoeur]

Pull quote: "Before the article appears, authors and reviewers will be notified of the publication of the review report and the originally submitted manuscript alongside the article. Reviewers can choose whether or not their name will be revealed, thus avoiding the pitfalls mentioned in The Ups and Downs of Peer Review and Effect of open peer review on quality of reviews and on reviewers’ recommendations: a randomised trial, in which reviewers are reluctant to sign reviews, especially negative ones."

[stephenfrancoeur]

Pull quote: "While Darnton was careful to accord respect to the 'legitimate interest of the book industry', he was not shy about criticizing what he sees as excessive commercialization. Said Darnton, 'the cultural commons has been largely appropriated by business interests,' and he called for finding 'a just equilibrium.' In particular he cited Google Books, which proposed to scan library’s holdings for free and then sell access to the content back to them, as well as the escalating cost of scientific journals – four times the rate of inflation, he said – and the efforts of publishers like Elsevier to prevent public access to taxpayer funded researcher via opposing NIH efforts and the Federal Research Public Access Act, and championing the now-defunct Research Works Act."