scholarly communication

Harvard senior thesis project

On the heels of the Harvard faculty mandate for open access to their scholarly work, Harvard students have created a website for posting freely accessible copies of seniors’ theses. More specifically, this website was developed by the Harvard College Free Culture group, a local chapter of Students for Free Culture, a national organization inspired by, among other things, Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture. For more background, see this lively discussion of the Harvard faculty mandate on the Chronicle’s news blog.

Sticker Shock 2

The engineering library at Cornell University has updated their original Sticker Shock display. Visit Sticker Shock 2 for a visual tour of price increases for a small selection of engineering journals. It’s a stunning display that emphasizes how much libraries spend to deliver quality information to its community of researchers. Another sticker shock display that illustrates rising journal costs can be found through the Snell Library’s Scholarly Communication pages.

New Scholarly Communication Resource

“Scholarly communication” may not sound like all that exciting of a topic, but there’s actually so many interesting ways in which it affects all of us in academia, whether we’re students, faculty, or staff. A committee here at Snell Library has been working really hard to assemble a resource for the NU community on scholarly communication. This website provides news and information about topics related to this issue, such as academic publishing, copyright issues, and open access. Be sure to check out this great new site if you’re interested in any of these areas!