Odd Spat: Academic Publishers vs. Universities
June 11, 2011
With the transition of formerly printed content to digital formats in academia, publishers of these academic materials are experiencing severe reductions to their revenue stream. Professors often put course materials on e-reserves, making it so students can access a single copy without having to pay for individual copies.
“Academic Publishers Attempting To Eliminate Fair Use At Universities [Updated]” from TechDirt.com delves into this issue and mentions specific entities in this ongoing battle. In one instance, “Cambridge, Oxford, & Sage publishers are filing against Georgia State University and asking the court to issue one of the all-time-detrimental-to-education injunctions in the modern era.”
This is clearly a heated debate and has been for some time. The write up said:
In 1994 publishers sought to deal with e-reserves at the Conference on Fair Use (CONFU), but the issue proved so contentious that the participants could not agree on a recommendation for the final report. Since then, the threat of litigation has loomed over a number of universities concerning their e-reserves, as publishers’ reproduction revenues dipped.
This demonstrates publishers’ inability to adapt to the current environment. Everything has been going digital for a while now and an industry that relies so heavily on paper printing should have been prepared for this. The film and music industries have adapted to this climate, even books are popular in digital format; academic publishers need to board the train.
Our understanding is that academic publishers depend on university professors and those hard working graduate students to craft the content academic publishers publish.
Universities have found benefit from student loans. Perhaps academic publishers should explore some creative options as well.
Stephen E Arnold, June 11, 2011
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
