By Dr. Frank Lowney This past weekend, Dr. Frank Lowney, an occasional TeleRead contributor, brought to our attention an online archive of free, Creative Commons licensed university textbooks known as the Flatworld Knowledge Book Archive. We heard from Dr. Lowney again yesterday; he told us that "another, larger source of free e-textbooks can actually be found on iTunes U. But that story, he said, is a bit more complicated." His explanation follows: Educational providers, such as institutions of higher education, can get a public iTunes U site from Apple at zero cost. Those public sites contain both "collections" and "courses." A collection can...

The Bookseller recently published what appears to be a very interesting article about a sort of bookseller's university that Waterstones—the UK-based bookstore chain—plans to open at some point in the near-to-distant future. And I use the term "appears," by the way, because the article in question in available only to subscribers of the website's premium content, of which I am not one. Bummer. The article's abstract, at any rate, claims that Waterstones Academy, as the school will be known, will be an "industry first" in the UK. Students of the nine month-long program, which will be operated in partnership with the...

I wrote, a couple of April Fool’s Days ago, that the rash of fake stories on April 1 might serve as good practice for us to use all year ‘round in figuring out whether that story our friends emailed to us is true. It turns out that redditors—the denizens of news discussion forum site Reddit—have that ability in spades. The Atlantic recently posted an article about a college course professor T. Mills Kelly offers from time to time at George Mason University which tries to teach its students to become better at evaluating historical fact by creating historical...

From a BML Bowker Announcement: While the majority of the U.K.’s undergraduate students are now using e-books, none are yet relying on them as a primary source of information. Print continues its hold as a key resource for at least two-thirds of students. That’s one of the key findings of a major new study that explores student information sources in the digital world from the book research experts at BML, a Bowker business. The study was conducted in December 2011 and shows significant change since 2003 when BML conducted similar research. [Clip] Indeed, the study plots a variety of changes and pace at...

From the Daily Iowan: Authors want electronic publishing, and the University of Iowa Press is following with the trend. UI Press Director Jim McCoy said the press has approximately 800 books in print, with around 75 percent of those books digitized. Around 5 percent of total book sales is from e-books, he said, whereas two years ago, the sales from e-books were practically nothing. "I would say that's a substantial jump," he said. The press currently offers or publishes an electronic version of almost every book it has, because it is expected in the marketplace, McCoy said. "We distribute almost to anyone who's in the...

In a related note to my piece the other day on high-priced academic indexes, Ars Technica and Techdirt are reporting on a movement by some academics to boycott Elsevier, an expensive (and big-profit earning) scientific journal publishing company which supported recent restrictive legislation: SOPA and PIPA, which were defeated, and the Research Works Act, which hasn’t been yet. The RWA would prevent “private sector research work” from being forced into an open access model—but the definition of “private sector research work” is loose enough that it could include a lot of federally-funded work too. After prominent British mathematician Tim...

Tina Chrzastowski has self-archived "Assessing the Value of Ebooks to Academic Libraries and Users" in IDEALS. Here's an excerpt: In 2010, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Library agreed to take part in a global study of Elsevier electronic books (ebooks) sponsored by Elsevier Publishing. Ultimately, 129 UIUC faculty and graduate students participated in a logbook study that examined the ebook discovery process, detailed the way in which this group of researchers used ebooks, and queried users on the value they assigned to Elsevier ebooks. Going beyond the Elsevier survey, this study examines the...

From the press release: Cambridge University Press is pleased to announce the addition of six more academic presses to its University Publishing Online (UPO) platform. 2012 will see the addition of content from Anthem Press, Boydell & Brewer, Edinburgh University Press, Nottingham University Press, Pickering & Chatto and the University of Adelaide Press. Launched in October 2011, University Publishing Online provides access to thousands of titles from scholarly Presses around the world, accessible through quick, powerful search and browse functionality. Anthem Press are scheduled to launch in March with 125 titles across a broad range...

DeGruyter and Harvard University Press just announced a new collaboration.  DeGruyter will serve as a sales partner for HUP’s eBook collection, both front and backlist.  The titles will be available on DeGruyter’s recently released interface which integrates book, journal, and databank content.  More information on the announcement is in the press release at the bottom of this post.  I was able to ask Sven Fund, CEO of DeGruyter, additional questions about the collaboration, to which he responded: How did this partnership with Harvard come about? De Gruyter is in regular communication with partners in the industry, of course...

From the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog: December 19, 2011 Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 45 (2011): Includes "Data Sharing in the Sciences," "Some Economic Aspects of the Scholarly Journal System," "Toward a Functional Understanding of Fair Use in U.S. Copyright Law" and other articles. College & Research Libraries News 72, no. 11 (2011): Includes "Is Free Inevitable in Scholarly Communication?: The Economics of Open Access" and other articles. First Monday 16, no. 12 (2011): Includes "Achieving Rigor and Relevance in Online Multimedia Scholarly Publishing" and other articles. Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship 23, no. 4 (2011): Includes "Metadata Dictionary Database: A Proposed Tool for Academic...

From The Chronicle of Higher Education: The National Autonomous University of Mexico, better known as UNAM, has said it will make virtually all of its publications, databases, and course materials freely available on the Internet over the next few years—a move that some academics speculated could push other universities in the region to follow suit. Campus officials at UNAM, Mexico's largest university, said the program, known as All of UNAM Online, could double or triple the institution's 3.5 million publicly available Web pages, as the largest collection of its kind in Latin America. They also said...

Lest we think that the lawsuit against Google that has been spinning its wheels for six years and gone precisely nowhere was the extent of the Authors Guilds efforts to fight the Google Books scanning projects, the Guild has struck again with a lawsuit against the universities that partnered with Google in the project, and the cooperative organization, HathiTrust, set up to manage those works. The Authors Guild, its counterparts from various Commonwealth countries, and a group of authors have filed suit to block the use of unauthorized scans of copyrighted works from the universities libraries as part...