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Thursday, September 22, 2011
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Authors Take Libraries to Court in Face Off on Copyright Issues
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by Nancy K. Herther
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As with a difficult pregnancy, the birthing of a new publishing model for the 21st century has proven complex and painful for everyone involved. The focus of much of the debate and angst has centered on what the publishing industry and authors see as the nexus of the struggle: Google Books, and recent actions seem to be taking this struggle aggressively to new levels. On Sept. 12, eight authors—including James Shapiro and Fay Weldon—along with three key organizations representing authors in North America and Australia—filed suit to stop academic libraries from their participation in HathiTrust digitization projects (in cooperative agreements with Google Books).
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De Gruyter Acquires bepress Journal Porfolio
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The academic publisher De Gruyter and The Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) announced that they reached an agreement for De Gruyter to acquire bepress's journal portfolio. The agreement covers a total of 67 journals in the areas of law, business/economics, humanities, and natural sciences. bepress reports it "is exiting the subscription-based journal publishing business because we believe we can have the greatest impact on scholarly communications by dedicating ourselves to enabling library-led publishing and research dissemination programs with Digital Commons."
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FirstRain Adds Executives and LinkedIn Access to Business Web Monitoring
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FirstRain added people to the business intelligence types you can monitor. This means you can now search for and monitor executives, find single-click connections to your LinkedIn network at any company, easily link to an executive's LinkedIn profile page, and access its rapidly expanding collection of key info on thousands of top executives.
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USA.gov Hosting National Dialogue on Improving Federal Websites
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USA.gov announced it is hosting a National Dialogue on Improving Federal Websites Sept. 19-30, 2011. This 2-week, online dialogue is your chance to submit, vote, and comment on ideas for improving various aspects of federal websites, such as: content, search, usability, accessibility, social media, multilingual content, and online services. Future changes based on these ideas could directly impact the work government agencies like the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health do every day.
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Upstart Legal Services Gain Traction
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by Paula J. Hane
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What a lot of activity we've seen lately in online legal services—acquisitions, investments, new traction in the market, and even newly launched services. The traditional methods of practicing law have been challenged of late, with some of the work formerly done by lawyers now able to be performed by technology. And, the rise of free sources of legal information, such as Fastcase and Justia.com, continue to rock the market. Yes, we live in interesting and disruptive times.
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