Suchergebnisse

In light of the challenge and promise currently facing scholarly publishing's move to digital models of greater openness, this paper offers a point of historical reflection on an earlier era of concern over sustainable access to learned works. It reports on a period of great turmoil in publishing that ran from the end of British book licensing in 1695, which unleashed a great wave of print piracy and sedition, to the legal remedy afforded by the Statute of Anne 1710, which introduced what we now think of as modern copyright law. The paper begins with John Locke's lobbying of Parliament to end the effrontery of press censorship and monopoly maintained by the three-decade old Licensing Act of 1662. The scholar-friendly legal reforms of this act that Locke proposed in the 1690s were not taken up by Parliament when it allowed the act to expire in 1695. However, six years after Locke's death in 1704, his and others' proposed reforms were to find a place in the Statute of Anne 1710. This legislation was the first to vest authors with an exclusive, limited-term right to print copies of their work, while also protecting the access rights of scholars and the public to these and other works. I argue that the history of the statute reveals how the age of copyright began with striking a fine legislative balance between the interests of learning and those of commercial publishing, while also offering further insight into Locke's influential work on property rights and limits. My hope is that this portrayal of Locke's relatively effective political intervention as scholar-activist and public defender of learning in relation to the subsequent Statute of Anne might inspire and lend weight to the academic community's current grappling with the growing commercial dominance of scholarly publishing.

In addressing the question of how new technologies can improve the public quality and presence of academic research, this article reports on the current online use of research by policymakers. Interviews with a sample of 25 Canadian policymakers at the federal level were conducted, looking at the specific role that online research has begun to play in their work, and what frustrations they face in using this research. The study found widespread use of online research, increasing the consultation of this source in policy analysis and formation. The principal issues remain those of access, indexing and credibility, with policymakers restricting themselves in large part to open access sources. Still, online research is proving a counterforce to policymakers' reliance on a small number of academic consultants as gatekeepers and sources for research. What is needed, it becomes clear, is investigations into whether innovative well-indexed systems that integrate a range of academic and non-academic resources might increase the political impact of research in the social sciences and education.

Differences in attitude among adult English-speakers towards "English" are so radical as to suggest that they represent other differences, more far-reaching and deeper-seated than we customarily assume. Some prostrate themselves before the crudest command to be correct in language; others revere and practise subtle plays of meaning in literature or speech. Such a difference in values surely has a moral dimension. Willinsky has explored the roots of these differences in a study of the different streams in a Canadian high school (reported elsewhere), and discusses here its implications. Not only different practices but also sharply different attitudes were reflected in the declarations of both teachers and students at the "academic" and the "general" level English classes. He points out that the real consequence of the way this streaming is currently being interpreted by many Canadian teachers of English is that one group of students probably acquires a moral authority that has been denied to the other. He becomes specific about the means by which teachers must rid their program of popular misconceptions about language, if it is not to continue to divide the population not only on the topic of literature, but also in social, political, and moral terms. RÉSUMÉ Les différences d'attitude qu'on note chez les anglophones à l'égard de "l'anglais" sont si radicales qu'on pourrait supposer qu'elles reflètent d'autres différences plus profondes qu'on ne l'estime généralement. Certains se prosternent devant les régles les plus grossières afin de s'exprimer correctement; d'autres par contre favorisent et pratiquent des jeux de mots subtils en littérature ou dans la conversation. De telles différences au niveau des valeurs reflètent Sûrement une dimension morale. Willinsky a exploré les origines de ces différences dans une étude sur les différentes tendances observées dans une école secondaire canadienne (dont il est fait état ailleurs), et expose ici ces répercussions. Non seulement différentes pratiques, mais également des attitudes fondamentalement divergentes sont apparues dans les déclarations des instituteurs et des etudiants aux cours d'anglais "littéraires" et "généraux". L'auteur souligne que le véritable conséquence du mode d'interprétation de ces courants par de nombreux professeurs d'anglais canadiens réside dans le fait qu'un groupe d'étudiants acquiert probablement une autorité morale qui a été refusée à l'autre. L'auteur propose des moyens spécifiques auxquels doivent recourir les enseignants pour débarrasser leur programme des conceptions populaires erronées au sujet du langage, pour que ce courant ne continue pas de diviser la population non seulement au chapitre de la littérature mais également dans les questions sociales, politiques et morales.

International audience ; ScholarlyHub (SH) was launched in November 2017 as a portal to fund and create a social network for scholarship-using individuals and communities that is supported and directed from the bottom up and not beholden to venture capitalists on the one hand and governments on the other. As an inclusive, member-run portal, it hopes to connect rather than replace numerous non-profit and open-source OA initiatives, which tend to lack a visible and attractive front end, and which may not currently be interoperable. If its goals can be realized, SH may offer one solution to the full workflow platforms that for-profit conglomerates are on the cusp of achieving. This practitioner's paper presents the key characteristics of SH and offers an early progress report.

This paper attempts to cast a little historical light on current debate among scholars and publishers that appears to be over whether the academic journal is an endlessly exploitable commercial property or a public good to which all have right. It identifies key patterns in the patronage of medieval monasticism that helped to establish learning as an economically distinct form of labor, and is part of a larger historical project on the intellectual and institutional properties of learning in the West. Through the beneficence shown toward monasteries by the nobility and others, learned nuns and monks were able to operate with a degree of autonomy and trust in their scholarly work. The resulting manuscripts were directed toward the learning of others and, as such, were copied and circulated widely within the admittedly narrow confines of the monastic community. These scholarly labors became part of what attracted the continuing gifts of benefactors, who were prepared to direct a portion of their wealth to this expression of piety and discipline. This paper reflects, then, on institutional conditions that proved vital to the advancement of learning in the centuries leading up to the emergence of the university system in the Late Middle Ages. As such, it forms a point of historical reflection for the academic community today, as it reconsiders the principles by which research and scholarship should circulate within the new possibilities posed by the digital era.