Open Access is a big deal to librarians. Or at least it should be. It’s all about getting free and open access to scholarly literature. Many publishers are against this because it will mean they’ll lose money. They cover their greed, though, by invoking ideas of authority, quality, and the need for peer reviews. While those are important concepts, they’re a distraction from the main idea here, that scholarly research needs to be shared and not hidden in journals whose prices go up an average of 18% EVERY YEAR!

Today I read an excellent blog post on the ACRLog, written by Marc Meola. It’s about PRISM, an activist group that’s a part of the Association of American Publishers and which is against open access. The post is called “Use PRISM To Start A Dialogue On Open Access.” This post isn’t terribly long and it’s full of great links, so please click and give it a read.

Another good article was posted today in the Chronicle of Higher Education and is called “Playing Craps with Copyright?“. It continues the discussion about the copyright issues that Google’s book digitization project has stirred up. Also has good links.