“I think that the open access activists will win out.”
“Beginning in fall 2013, all incoming students will be required to purchase an iPad mini, which will come loaded with the student’s summer reading and core curriculum texts, created by Lynn faculty. Priced at $475, the iPad mini will cost half as much as students were paying for print versions of their course readers, and they will get to keep the device.”
“Academia also needs to cut back on low-quality graduate programs. Too many universities tried to become research institutions during the lost decade, adding graduate programs and research faculty, often using tuition dollars to finance their expansions. Today, too many of these programs remain far short of their goals, and their ambitions have come at a great cost to their core mission of educating undergraduates (as well as producing many dropouts and unemployed Ph.D.’s).”

This is an excellent post on the Harvard Library mess from withawonder:

Maybe the Twitterverse overreacted to the town hall meetings concerning the next step in the Harvard restructuring project. After all, “It is inaccurate to say that all library staff will need to reapply for their positions,” according to a statement made to Library Journal by Kira Poplowski,…

Chris took the time to sift through the morass of information coming from #hlth yesterday. Here is the result.

“Harvard has the second largest endowment in the world, second only to the funds held by the Vatican. If Harvard is unwilling to fund research librarians, you can bet most US libraries will quickly ditch their staff as well. This will impact your health, because it impacts medical research. This will impact the economy, because it will impact engineers needing information access. This will impact all areas of R&D in the United States, because much of the in-depth research assistance to those working on DARPA, NIH, and other government grants is - surprise!! - conducted on behalf of researchers by academic and research librarians.”

Massive reorganization and layoffs are imminent at Harvard Library. Follow #hlth (Harvard Library Town Hall) for more information as it comes.

“So what would happen if say on April 1, 2012 academic libraries around the country turned off their proxies? Would the world notice or would people just think that the servers at Science were down for the afternoon?”

ghardin:

This is the moment academic publishers gave up all pretence of being on the side of scientists. Their rhetoric has traditionally been of partnering with scientists, but the truth is that for some time now scientific publishers have been anti-science and anti-publication. The Research Works Act, introduced in the US Congress on 16 December, amounts to a declaration of war by the publishers.

“Research Libraries UK, which includes the Russell Group university libraries, as well as Britain’s national libraries and Trinity College Library Dublin, have told Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell that they will not renew their current deals when they expire at the end of this year unless the concession is made.”