Feb. 12, 2008.  Harvard: free journal article publishing

The Harvard arts and science faculty now requires members to make their scholarly articles available free online through that
university’s website (Feb.12/08). The new policy apparently makes Harvard the first university in the USA to mandate open access to its faculty members’ research publications, aiming to ensure that the academic community has more control over how articles are used and disseminated. 

Faculty may request a waiver, but otherwise must provide an electronic version of each article for placement in an online repository. Harvard authors may publish in any journal that permits posting online after publication. About two-thirds of pay-access journals allow such posting in online repositories.  Authors would still retain their copyright and could publish anywhere else. 

With information from NY Times and The Chronicle Review.

Jan.21, 2008.  Internet 'meltdown' inevitable?

If a cable breaks or a server goes down the Internet is set up to just keeps on running in a modular fashion (by re-routing transmissions through other servers). However, The Business Roundtable (a Washington, DC-based public policy advocacy group) predicts a “10% to 20% chance of a breakdown of the critical information infrastructure” in the next 10 years, brought on by “malicious code, coding error, natural disasters, or attacks by terrorists and other adversaries”.

Many aspects of business are affected by unscheduled unavailability of the Internet including email, collaboration, e-commerce, public-facing and internal websites, as well as information retrieval.

The roundtable says business often mistakenly believes that government will take the lead in restoring network services following an Internet failure, and that having a few IT specialists on hand is preparation enough to deal with all downtime repercussions.

With excerpts from Computerworld.
 

About this News page

Publishing is the delivery of information that is written and formatted in a way to produce a desired effect on a mass audience.

At Brookeline we feel it is important for our clients to know how information is managed for public consumption.

The articles (or edited excerpts) on this page are written by Mary Brooke at Brookeline (with sources shown) to summarize complex issues and to reveal -- where appropriate) -- the story behind the story.