"Rachel Burley of Wiley-Blackwell Open Access: "the launch of new subscription journals is pretty stagnant." #ssp2012" Interesting, if true.

I participated in a series of meetings last week to determine how the Duke Libraries would respond to the bankruptcy filing made by subscription agent Swets. We have been through this before, when Faxon/RoweCom failed, and many libraries lost a lot of money. Unfortunately, more money is going to be lost this time around. Perhaps it is time for us to think about how we got into this situation——and how to make sure we never end up back here again.

Statement against NDAs in content licenses.

Good old Access Copyright.

Nice infographic.

Universite de Montreal explains its decision to cancel the living crap out of a Wiley Big Deal.

Researchers in institutions of higher education depend on access to the scholarly record, and academic libraries play a critical role in supporting this researc

managing electronic resources using linked data a subproject of the cooperation between Leipzig University Library and SLUB Dresden Leander Seige / Natanael Ar…

I am pretty sure that Harvard Business School spends some time teaching its students about Google’s “Don’t be evil” business statement. While I am also pretty sure that it d…

Text and data mining is a hot topic. It has been extensively discussed in copyright and open-access discussions and has been mentioned in many recent policies in these areas. But is there a fundamental disconnect between what researchers want to do and what information providers think they need?

From Reuters: Buyout firm BC Partners agreed to buy German publisher SpringerScience+Business Media for about 3.3 billion euros ($4.4 billion) on Wednesday, the largest private-equity acquisition in Germany for seven years.

For those who don’t know, the Big Deal is an arrangement with ejournal publishers to bundle their entire content into a large package of ejournals, while charging less than the full content would cost a library through individual subscriptions. An example is Elsevier, which provides something called the “Freedom Package” to academic libraries. For a relatively small percentage of what a library pays for Elsevier subscriptions, the library get access to everything Elsevier publishes. That’s the upside. The downside is that, once locked into multiyear licenses for these Big Deals, libraries are unable to reduce their number of subscriptions or lower their ejournal costs if they need to.

The stock market has hit record highs, and unemployment has reached the lowest level since the recession began. Despite this good news, the library economic environment has not seen commensurate improvement. There continues to be a struggle to find the resources needed to support library collections and services, and conditions remain highly unsettled.

Elsevier has two reasons to buy Mendeley. One is to squash it: to destroy or coöpt an open-science icon that threatens its business model.

Includes a decent brief history of journal publishing and its business models.