The 6th incarnation of Elmer's blog
The always-insightful Alex Reid has penned an essay “on the question of open peer review,” which examines a draft white paper posted to Media Commons last week. The paper—Open Review: A Study of Contexts and Practices—struggles, Reid argues, to address a critical question: “What is the problem with existing scholarly review procedures that the open review process seeks to solve?”
via New Media Commons white paper examines future of transparency in peer review | opensource.com.
The forthcoming 0.6.0 version of Sigil, my favorite desktop EPUB editor, is going to have a WYSIWYG HTML editor in the BookView. This is a much needed addition to a great tool that will allow for greater control over the editing and creation of EPUBs.
From Making epub happen:
The next release of Sigil is shaping up nicely. There is so much going into it that the next release will be 0.6.0. Unfortunately, EPUB 3 will not be one of the features making it into 0.6.0. One major change coming will be a new BookView (BV) editor. Here is an unfished preview of what it might look like.
This is only a concept preview of the new editor. One issue that needs to be resolved is the double tool bar. I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to use the one in the BV pane or the global one in the window itself
Portico is pleased to announce that Cambridge University Press will preserve its Cambridge Books Online content with Portico. Through this agreement, Cambridge extends its relationship with Portico, which began in 2006 with the publisher’s commitment to deposit its entire list of e-journals in the Portico archive.
“As more users turn to online access for books, a digital preservation strategy to ensure long-term access is absolutely vital,” stated Hannah Perrett, Strategic Development Director, Digital Publishing, Cambridge University Press. “Portico’s E-Book Preservation Service provides publishers and libraries with a collaborative solution that we can all get behind.”
http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202534457162
The American Bar Association is changing the way it collects graduate employment information from law schools.
The council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar on Dec. 3 approved a new annual questionnaire intended to gather more detailed information about where recent law grads find work. The change came as law students, graduates and three U.S. senators heaped criticism on the ABA and law schools for not providing prospective law students with an accurate picture of graduate employment and salary levels.
For my librarian friends out there (you know who you are). This is the keynote from the New England Library Association Annual Conference, delivered October 2, 2011. He has a lot of interesting and provocative ideas about the future of librarianship that are well delivered in this talk. He even manages to get a shout out to law librarians. Should give you something to think about on things like dealing with the folks who come through the front door and librarians’ role is society (hint: is shouldn’t be passive). Well worth the hour.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1944664
The internet is more than a place where the Millennial Generation communicates, plays, and shops. It’s also a medium that raises issues central to nearly every existing field of legal doctrine, whether basic (such as Torts, Property, or Contracts) or advanced (such as Intellectual Property, Criminal Procedure, or Securities Regulation). This creates tremendous opportunities for legal educators interested in using the live internet for experiential education. This Article examines how live websites can be used to create engaging and holistic simulations that tie together doctrine, theory, skills, and values in ways impossible to achieve with the case method. In this Article, the author discusses observations stemming from his experiences teaching law courses using live, online role-playing simulations that cast students in the role of attorneys. The Article concludes that such simulations have significant benefits for law students, and surprisingly, can also benefit scholars who use simulations proactively to deepen the synergies between their teaching and scholarship. However, the resources required for simulations may also exacerbate long-standing systemic tensions in legal education, particularly regarding institutional resources as well as the sometimes conflicting roles of faculty as teacher-scholars. Because the American Bar Association will almost certainly, and appropriately, require law schools to expand their simulation offerings, the benefits and tradeoffs of simulations teaching must be addressed now.
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/11/09/essay-why-smart-people-make-foolish-ethical-choices
Every time there is a new ethics scandal, whether in a university or some other setting (such as in government or the corporate world), observers wonder how those involved could have been so stupid. Could they really have done the things of which they are accused? If so, what were they thinking?
In fact, there are three precipitating factors for ethics scandals that practically guarantee that they will not be going away anytime soon. The three factors are foolishness, the complexity of ethical reasoning, and ethical drift, which I discuss in turn.
Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/11/09/essay-why-smart-people-make-foolish-ethical-choices#ixzz1dLKWYdlv
Inside Higher Ed
http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2011/11/creative-commons-media-neutrality-and.html
Here’s where it gets complicated.
Not so long ago, book publishers had no idea that there would be such things as digital books. Publishing contracts mentioned nothing about ebooks. Literary agents made sure to keep derivative rights separate, so that translation rights, film rights, stage adaptation rights, etc. for a successful book could be separately monetized.
When ebooks started to become important, the digital publisher Rosetta Books took advantage of the situation, and started acquiring ebook rights to well-known books such as Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. This did not please the print publishers at all. Random House, one of the “Big Six” US publishers, took Rosetta to court, saying that their publishing contracts gave them exclusive rights to distribute books, and ebooks were books.The coffee’s on, let’s get to work.
There are industries that use the same raw materials, yet are not the same. Commercial firms that deliver purified water to companies consume water, fuel, and vehicles. Yet, not a single one is in competition with the local swimming pool company.
Guys trucking 5-gallon water jugs around to offices are doing something with the same materials that is completely different than what the other company — digging, lining, and purifying your swimming pool — is doing.
So, are open access publishers and traditional publishers really in the same business?
http://www.educause.edu/blog/jcummings/USDeptofEdReaffirmsOERSupportH/241218
Last week, Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter led an education policy briefing at U.S. Department of Education headquarters that put a spotlight on the department’s support for open educational resources (OER). Joined by two of her senior policy advisors long associated with the OER movement, Hal Plotkin (journalist and former president of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District board) and Joel Thierstein (former executive director of the OER organization, Connexions), as well as by the director of the department’s Office of Educational Technology, Karen Cator, Kanter spoke at length about the importance the department places on the continued development of OER.
