Libraries : New Cites & Insights. The January issue of Walt Crawford's Cites & Insights is now online. This issue contains comments on Amazon's Search Inside the Book, Ebooks and Etext, another excellent installment of his Copyright Currents, and a essay arguing that the boycott and cancellations of Elsevier titles signals a tipping point against big-deal bundling. Excerpt: "I hope there’s momentum. I hope faculty members pay attention --that they find alternative routes to publication and support necessary cuts to keep the system alive. I hope some scholarly associations start to see that their first purpose in publishing should be to make scholarship widely available --and that accepting or matching outrageous commercial prices is no way to do that."

But above this issue contains a long and detailed section, Scholarly Article Access, commenting on the launch of PLoS Biology, the STM Publishers' defensive campaign against OA, John Willinsky's nine flavors of OA, Richard O'Grady's reflections on funding OA, the debate between Elsevier's Arie Jongejan and BMC's Jan Velterop, and several other recent OA developments.

The only bad news is that this is Walt's last sustained coverage of OA. One of his reasons is that the field is already well-covered. "Peter Suber does a superb job of covering Open Access and related issues in SOAN, SOAF, and the Open Access News weblog. He provides fair (that is, intellectually honest) summaries of articles and news items even when he disagrees with them, and adds his own comments in an ethical, insightful and enjoyable manner." (Thanks, Walt.) If he didn't have another reason --limited time and unlimited other topics to cover-- I'd have to remind him that we have a history of civil disagreements, just one reason why my voice shouldn't exclude his. But Walt did leave the door ajar to return to this topic. "As a humanist, I am appalled at the thought that universities and colleges have stripped book budgets (and budgets for typically inexpensive humanities journals and periodicals) to the bone in order to keep paying outrageous prices for STM journals. As an observer, I have a complex set of opinions about the various strains contained within the current controversies. As appropriate, I'll continue to comment." [Open Access News]

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