OLDaily

The Century collegiate handbook
Garland Greever, Internet Archive, 2017/10/11

This is one of the many books from  'freed' by the Internet Archive under a rule "which allows for non-profit libraries and archives to reproduce, distribute, display and publicly perform a work if it meets the criteria of: a published work in the last twenty years of copyright, and after conducting a reasonable investigation, no commercial exploitation or copy at a reasonable price could be found." This particular volume dates from 1939 and is basically a guide to clear writing. Students today could do worse. The collection as a whole contains a number of gems (eating up far too much of my afternoon) including A Dictionary of American Slang (including a separate section for baseball slang), Beyond the Solar System (asks the question: are there other solar systems?), Diplomatically Speaking (the autobiography of a young American diplomat up to and through WW1) and, well, so much more. The collection as a whole is called The Sonny Bono Memorial Collection. Via DigitalKoans.

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Confessions of an Open Access Advocate
Becky Hillyer, Leslie Chan, OCSD Net, 2017/10/11

Two years after the first issue of IRRODL the Budapest Open Access Initiative coing the term (we are told) open access. You have to dig through the archives but I covered it here in OLDaily, and since then have had more than 500 posts dedicated to the topic. So how have things gone since then? In this blunt interview BOAI signatory Leslie Chan suggests that they were too focused on access, and far less focused on production, and especially with respect to whose voices are heard. I found this via Richard Poynder, who adds in his own article that "fifteen years after BOAI, legacy publishers are successfully co-opting both forms of OA outlined at the 2002 meeting... It also now seems likely that they will co-opt the reinvigorated preprint movement, and eventually colonise the entire research workflow... The crucial point here is that legacy publishers remain firmly in control of scholarly communication. Amongst other things, this means they can be expected to continue to plunder the public purse." So, yeah, a rethink (and a reset) is required.

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