Kent Anderson, Are Publishers Anti-Publishing? Scholarly Kitchen , December 2, 2008.  Excerpt: See Kevin Smith's reply, What is “value” in publishing? Scholarly Communications @ Duke , December 5, 2008.

Virginia Heffernan, Content and Its Discontents, New York Times Magazine , December 5, 2008.  Excerpt: Comments Heffernan is writing about news and popular culture, but how far do her conclusions carry over to research literature?  Some online journal articles are little more than digital editions of printed text.

The Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law has publicly released its comment on the EU green paper, Copyright in the Knowledge Economy.  See esp.

In the past couple of days, the Google Book Search FAQ changed its answer to the question, How can I find books that I can download? The old answer: The new answer: Comments After some initial uncertainty, I've decided that this is just a change of language, not a change of functionality.

The Université de Liège in June launched a pilot of ORBi, its new IR. See also the blog post by ULg rector Bernard Rentier. The IR went into general use recently; see the post by Rentier or by INIST.

JISC has announced a call for proposals for funding various types of repository projects. Bids are due February 11, 2009.

Jane Park, Collaborative Statistics — An Open Textbook Model, Creative Commons blog, December 3, 2008. Interview with Susan Dean and Barbara Illowsky, authors of Collaborative Statistics.

Stéphane Goldstein, Radicalism and data, Research Information Network blog, undated but recent.

Stian Håklev, World’s largest university opens almost ALL its materials!, Random Stuff that Matters, December 5, 2008. See also our past post on eGyanKosh, IGNOU's teaching document repository.

Maria Cassella, Facciamo il punto su ... Open Access e i nuovi modelli della comunicazione scientifica, presentation to the Associazione italiana biblioteche, Campania section (Salerno, November 27, 2008). English abstract:

David Bollier, Not Just Peak Oil, But “Peak Hierarchy,” Too?, OnTheCommons.org, December 4, 2008.