Tag: Publishing
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Judge Strikes Down COPA
Last week a Federal judge struck down COPA, a law requiring adult websites to use age verification technology. The ruling by Senior Judge Lowell A. Reed Jr. held COPA unconstitutional because it is more restrictive of speech (but no more effective) than the alternative of allowing private parties to use filtering software. This is the…
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Fact check: The New Yorker versus Wikipedia
In July—when The New Yorker ran a long and relatively positive piece about Wikipedia—I argued that the old-media method of laboriously checking each fact was superior to the wiki model, where assertions have to be judged based on their plausibility. I claimed that personal experience as a journalist gave me special insight into such matters,…
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Google Print, Damages and Incentives
There’s been lots of discussion online of this week’s lawsuit filed against Google by a group of authors, over the Google Print project. Google Print is scanning in books from four large libraries, indexing the books’ contents, and letting people do Google-style searches on the books’ contents. Search results show short snippets from the books,…
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Secrecy in Science
There’s an interesting dispute between astronomers about who deserves credit for discovering a solar system object called 2003EL61. Its existence was first announced by Spanish astronomers, but another team in the U.S. believes that the Spaniards may have learned about the object due to an information leak from the U.S. team. The U.S. team’s account…
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Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Plan
Despite J.K. Rowling’s decision not to offer the new Harry Potter book in e-book format, it took less than a day for fans to scan the book and assemble an unauthorized electronic version, which is reportedly circulating on the Internet. If Rowling thought that her decision against e-book release would prevent infringement, then she needs…
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When Wikipedia Converges
Many readers, responding to my recent quality-check on Wikipedia, have argued that over time the entries in question will improve, so that in the long run Wikipedia will outpace conventional encyclopedias like Britannica. It seems to me that this is the most important claim made by Wikipedia boosters. If a Wikipedia entry gets enough attention,…
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Wikipedia vs. Britannica Smackdown
On Friday I wrote about my spot-check of the accuracy of Wikipedia, in which I checked Wikipedia’s entries for six topics I knew well. I was generally impressed, except for one entry that went badly wrong. Adam Shostack pointed out, correctly, that I had left the job half done, and I needed to compare to…
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Wikipedia Quality Check
There’s been an interesting debate lately about the quality of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Critics say that Wikipedia can’t be trusted because any fool can edit it, and because nobody is being paid to do quality control. Advocates say that Wikipedia allows domain experts to write entries, and that quality…
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More Journal Editors Have Declared Independence
In response to my previous post about the revolt by the editors of the Journal of Algorithms, Peter Suber points out that journal editors have “declared independence” before, at least twelve times. Peter’s blog, Open Access News is a great source for news about the trend toward open access to scholarly publications.
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Journal of Algorithms Editorial Board Revolts
The editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms has resigned en masse, to protest what they call price-gouging by Elsevier, the company that publishes the journal. The journal’s annual subscription price had risen to $700, which is beyond the reach of many libraries, not to mention individuals. The resigning board includes very distinguished computer scientists…