Yale law library’s Open Access publishing initiative produces enormous download rates for its authors, and makes the material available to scholars and others all over the world, without regard to their location or their institution’s budgetary priorities.

And many US libraries have taken this step: 55% of libraries in a just-released SPARC survey. Some other highlights:

• About three-quarters of the programs publish between one and six journals, the majority of which are only distributed electronically
• The vast majority of library publishing programs (almost 90%) were launched in order to contribute to change in the scholarly publishing system, supplemented by

The Wall Street Journal has a new piece on Amazon’s e-book lending service. Operating under the Amazon’s $79/year Prime service, the e-book lending will only work on Kindle and Kindle Fire devices (not iOS friendly), and is intended to boost sales of the Kindle devices. And as you might guess, it’s not available in Canada.

The article also has an interesting portion at the end on the relationship of Amazon’s Prime lending program to its library lending program:

At the Seattle public-library system, e-book borrowing rose 32% in the month after Kindle books became available, said Seattle’s electronic-resources librarian

According to yesterday’s press release, Irwin Law and Quebec digital publisher Nubook have agreed to distribute Irwin’s ebooks on a Nubook reading app designed for use on a tablet computer.

Irwin publisher, Jeffrey Miller, says:

…the Nubook solution allows us to preserve the unique and attractive design that differentiates our law books, while providing our readers with great features like refined search, links, and markups set up according to our editorial choices for the best reading experience.

Nubook has already developed an equivalent app for Wilson & Lafleur, as well as its own general purpose app. . . . [more]

I’ve come across a couple of new law reviews that might be of interest to SLAW readers…

1) The Washington Journal of Environmental Law and Policy from the University of Washington in Seattle. WJELP is a student run journal. Issues will be available for free online and the first issue is here. You can sign up for e-mail alerts of new issues at the journal’s website. All issues will also be archived at the University of Washington’s digital repository.

2) The Southampton Student Law Review is a new student publication from the Southhampton Law School in the UK. . . . [more]

I have been remiss at mentioning the free online conference Library 2.0 that started today at 9:30 am ET and continues around the clock through to the end of tomorrow. This page has a schedule of sessions listed according to your time zone. For a quick look at the schedule, check out the Eastern Standard Time schedule — sessions typically run for a 1/2 hour.

There is still time to sign up! Register for the Library 2.0 site. All sessions will be run using the Blackboard Collaborate platform. Session rooms have a bandwidth-related limit of 700 attendees. Word via . . . [more]

Aaron Swartz is that rare individual who is prepared to risk imprisonment in order to promote the cause of open access. And we’re not talking about liberating “tunes” or movies or, indeed, anything of much “entertainment value”; Swartz goes for the serious, you might say earnest, stuff. At the moment the young man stands accused of various crimes associated with his downloading of 4.8 million articles from JSTOR. (Many, but by no means all, readers of Slaw will know that JSTOR stands for “Journal Storage” and is a not-for-profit, but paywall-protected, online archive for academic journals.)

There are good . . . [more]

This has been Open Access Week across North America and even further afield. There have been many events. In Canada, CARL/ABRC has a list of OA Week events, but not everything is noted there. UVic’s own events, for instance. The ACRL Blog has collected a few highlights.

Of course, it is libraries that are often organizing these events, as librarians are best positioned to witness the daily spectacle of publicly funded research given away for peanuts or less into private hands. These in turn do very well by it, whether it is delivered in print . . . [more]

I want to revist Crookes v Newton, 2011 SCC 47 which Simon C mentioned previously. What I find interesting about this case is the expansion of legally defined technology terms (yes I know I might be the only one who finds this interesting). There is currently a paucity of legally defined technological terms and Crookes v Newton has expanded that pool by only adding a few definitions.

Previously hyperlink has been legally defined in in the lower court ruling 2008 BCSC 1424 in para 29 where hyperlink was defined as: “A hyperlink is like a footnote or a reference . . . [more]

The Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) is a Special Operating Agency of Industry Canada. Industry Canada is responsible for the administration of intellectual property in Canada. The Copyright Office is part of CIPO. Below is an excerpt of an interview with newly appointed Commissioner of Patents, Registrar of Trademarks and Chief Executive Officer of CIPO, Sylvain Laporte.

1. How many copyright registration certificates are issued in Canada each year? 

(Note that the fiscal year end of CIPO is March 31. The figures below and reported throughout this interview reflect this year end. For example, 2000-2001 reflects the period from April . . . [more]

Yesterday U.S. Register of Copyrights, Maria A. Pallante, released a Document setting out 17 priorities of the U.S. Copyright Office over the next two years on copyright policy and administrative practice, and announced 10 new projects. Interesting read for Canadians as many of the issues discussed and proposals for the next two years may affect Canadians. As the report states, the “Office’s registration system and the companion recordation system constitute the world’s largest database of copyright works and copyright ownership information.” In fact, many Canadians register their works in the U.S. Copyright Office (since a deposit of the work is . . . [more]

The staff at HeinOnline have a new, free HeinOnline iPad app to access their database.

Logging into the app is easy and users are invited to have their login and password information remembered.

Once logged in, one gets a table of contents of the various libraries in their database, depending on the scope of one’s subscription (e.g., Law Library Journal, US Reports, English Reports, Legal Classics, and so on).

Browsing by law journal title and volume is easy to do. At that stage, there is an option of viewing the table of contents for the particular volume. The screenshot below . . . [more]

No doubt many libraries in our community have already heard the news: SydneyPLUS has just purchased a big piece of the Inmagic pie. This includes Inmagic’s DB/Text Library Suite of products: DB/TextWorks, DB/Text WebPublisher Pro, and Inmagic Genie.

According to Kathy Bryce via Andornot’s blog:

The move will strengthen both SydneyPLUS and the new Inmagic division by bringing together complementary technologies to meet the needs of special librarians, while allowing Inmagic, Inc. to focus on new markets.

Inmagic, Inc. (the company) will retain its Presto technology and its related products PrestoKnowledgeNet, Presto AssociatioNet, . . . [more]