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scholarly communication

Five Greek epigraphs

My husband recently finished writing a book about foreign policy.  Just as it was about to go to press, he hit a snag: he had started each chapter with an epigraph, a short quotation, from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides.  Now, you would think that anyone who wrote 2,500 years ago would be out of copyright and could be quoted freely, and you would be right, BUT…the owner of the English translation that my husband was using wanted $150 for each quotation, or 750 clams total.  My husband could translate Thucydides himself but doesn’t feel terribly confident of his own ancient Greek skills, although he knows Greek “a little.”

Luckily, there is a translation that’s in the public domain, which means it can be freely copied and quoted.  It’s in the Perseus Digital Library, a web site with a wealth of primary and secondary source information on the ancient world.   So this is a grateful shoutout to the people behind Perseus: Greg Crane and Tufts University.   I’m in awe of this amazing example of scholarly publishing at its best!

Are you looking for advice about using someone else’s work in your own scholarship?  Ask your subject librarian at the NU Libraries for assistance.  Maybe there’s a resource like Perseus for you, too!

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!