al-mofhariz

On Monday, the  American Historical Association  published an official statement urging graduate programs and university libraries to "to adopt a policy that allows the embargoing of completed history PhD dissertations in digital form for as many as six years." The statement goes on to note that "History has been and remains a book-based discipline." However, the increasingly common practice of requiring that completed dissertations be posted freely online may make it more difficult for recent graduates to secure a publisher. This, in turn, could make it much more difficult for young scholars to earn tenure. As the comments section that follows the AHA's online publication of its statement against online publishing indicates, this strikes many as a backwards-looking strategy. As I have argued myself in a previous post on this blog, scholarly publishing is clearly moving online. And as it does so, the nature of how we consume, share, and disseminate knowledge i...

The Wikipedia Homepage on Jan. 18th, 2012 Today is a big day for the internet!  Visit the English-language version of Wikipedia and instead of the familiar start page, you'll see the ominous image above with a message prompting you to "Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge." By denying its Anglo-American users access to the site, Wikipedia is protesting two anti-piracy laws making their way through the United States Congress that it and many other internet content providers (especially social networking sites and blog hosts) claim are overly restrictive. These and other issues surrounding the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act are both important and complex. You can read more about them in today's Washington Post .  (If you have a subscription, you can also check out a story in today's New York Times .) But what caught my attention was another story in the Times , about a website called ResearchGate designed to encourage scientists to collaborate, s...