A publisher sues librarian blogger for millions

India Today, Rohan Venkataramakrishnan: "Last week University of Colorado librarian Jeffrey Beall was threatened with a billion dollar lawsuit and three years in prison all because he annoyed a publishing company.

Beall's blog, 'Scholarly Open Access' is popular for its comprehensive list of journals and publishers who engage in practices that he believes are predatory. " continue reading: Send Section 66A bullies home 

Academic publisher sues librarian blogger for millions, by Ariel Bogle, Melville House

On the same Open Source / Open Access shelf:

Blogger better be a billionaire, says 'open access' publisher lawsuit, OMICS offended by 'Beall's List' By Richard Chirgwin, Science

Cautiously Open to Open Science, by Gretchen Goldman, The Equation: Blog of the Union of Concerned Scientists (blog)

Of Predators and Public Health | Peer to Peer Review. By Kevin L. Smith, Library Journal (author's limited rights in an open access world)

Mathematicians Aim To Take Publishers Out of Publishing, Soulskill

Asking Authors to Buy 'Memberships' for Open Access, By Jennifer Howard Chronicle of Higher Education -- Extract: Jason Hoyt thinks scientific publishing can be faster, sleeker, and a whole lot cheaper. The Stanford-trained geneticist is a fan of open-access journals, which make scholarly articles freely available online rather than put them behind paywalls. But he argues that having authors shoulder big publishing fees—a popular model for open access—burdens researchers with costs that are too high, often thousands of dollars per article...

So much writing, is anyone reading? By Suntosh Pillay, Thought Leader

India's OMICS Publishing Group threatens scholarly critic with $1 billion lawsuit, jail time Cory Doctorow

Profiles of top universities of India

Note: These universities in India are found in the following linnks (ranked or listed on some unknown criteria)

India's top 50 universities - | Photo (in pictures) | India Today |

TOP 50 UNIVERSITIES IN INDIA 2010 -- Source: India Today magazine (May 2010) On the same shelf:

Shodhganga at INFLIBNET -- TheShodhganga@INFLIBNET Centre provides a platform for research students to deposit their Ph.D. theses and make it available to the entire scholarly community in open access. The repository has the ability to capture, index, store, disseminate and preserve ETDs submitted by the researchers.

M S University's H M library ranked among top 25 -- Prashant Rupera, TNN | Apr 29, 2013, Times of India

Why students need the right to copy

Shamnad Basheer, The Hindu, April 26, 2013

EXTRACT:
The lawsuit by publishers seeking to stop Delhi University from distributing photocopied course packs goes against the spirit of education for all. continue reading

Librarians should make this investment in themselves: Thoughts from Carl Grant

Ps. This is not my selection, but I strongly recommed the following (titles), and continue reading comments @ Thoughts from Carl Grant -- info courtesy: Stephen's Lighthouse: “You’ll be a better librarian after making this investment in yourself. You owe it to yourself and to our profession.”

Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne

The Filter Bubble by Eli Pariser.

The Atlas of New Librarianship by David Lankes.

Expect More by David Lankes.

British Library sets out to archive the Web

Extract:

By JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — Capturing the unruly, ever-changing Internet is like trying to pin down a raging river.
But the British Library is going to try.
For centuries the library has kept a copy of every book, pamphlet, magazine and newspaper published in Britain. Starting Saturday, it will also be bound to record every British website, e-book, online newsletter and blog in a bid to preserve the nation's "digital memory."
As if that's not a big enough task, the library also has to make this digital archive available to future researchers — come time, tide or technological change.
... "Stuff out there on the Web is ephemeral," said Lucie Burgess, the library's head of content strategy. "The average life of a web page is only 75 days, because websites change, the contents get taken down.
... Like reference collections around the world, the British Library has been attempting to archive the Web for years in a piecemeal way and has collected about 10,000 sites. Until now, though, it has had to get permission from website owners before taking a snapshot of their pages.
...
Tenner says keeping up with technology is only one challenge the project faces. Another is the inherently unstable nature of the Web. Information constantly mutates, and search engines' algorithms can change results and prices in an instant - as anyone who has booked airline tickets online knows.
"It is trying to capture an unstable, dynamic process in a fixed way, which is all a librarian can hope to do, but it is missing one of the most positive and negative aspects of the web," Tenner said.
"Librarians want things as fixed as possible, so people know where something is, people know the content of something. The problem is, the goals of the library profession and the structure of information have been diverging."
British Library spokesman Ben Sanderson acknowledged that this is new territory for an institution more used to documents written on parchment, paper and the fine calfskin known as vellum.
"Vellum - you don't need an operating system to read that," he said. Continue reading the full article, via abcnews.

Best Practices for Survival of Libraries in Severe Economic Times

This is a continuously updated post, last updated March 23, 2013

What is our city book lender doing boosting sales at Indigo? By Jonathan Goldsbie -- [extract: In addition to providing information about a particular book, the TPL’s online catalogue now also displays an invitation to “Buy your own copy and support the Toronto Public Library.”]

Middletown libraries ask residents for survival plan --Community liaisons will propose solutions for keeping branches open, BY KEITH HEUMILLER -- Extract: The collective fate of three Middletown library branches slated to close in March is now in the hands of resident volunteers.