Elsevier has bought Mendeley for an undisclosed sum. The Financial Times reported that the purchase price was £45-million (about $69-million), but neither company would confirm that.
The Chronicle.
The licensing terms set by the publisher, Taylor & Francis Group, were scaring away potential authors, the editor who resigned, Damon Jaggars, associate university librarian for collections and services at Columbia University, told The Chronicle. The publisher did not respond to a request for comment.
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The public currently has to wait 35 years after publication to have free access to articles, according to a spokeswoman for the group.
That will change early next year, when the journal Cultural Anthropology switches over to a fully open-access model.
The Chronicle.
Bryan Alexander, a senior fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, explores some potential explanations, including MOOCs’ relative novelty and their top-tier-university cachet. But the obvious answer is, as it nearly always is, money. For many institutions, MOOCs are viewed as a potential revenue stream, higher education’s business model of the future.
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David Parry, an assistant professor of emerging media and communications at the University of Texas at Dallas, argues that scholars have an obligation to publish their research in journals that make free copies available online. The Tech Therapy team talks with him about how the debate over open access to research has heated up in recent months, and invites journal publishers to give their views on next month’s podcast.
The Chronicle.
Providing college students with free textbooks is no easy task. That seems to be the major lesson from several efforts to produce e-books that are low-cost or free to help reduce students’ costs. Money pressures, slow adoption by professors, and quality concerns stand in the way as these projects hope to rival traditional publishing.
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