You guys are going to be very excited about this. Via Creative Commons comes the Make Textbooks Affordable Campaign to Reduce College Textbook Costs. I'll give you the first part of the faculty statement, which you can sign on the site:

Given that the cost of college textbooks has become a major affordability issue for low and middle income students, adding to the potential that these students will either drop out, take on additional loan debt to pay for textbooks, or undercut their own learning by forgoing the purchase of textbooks; and,

Given that textbook publishers have not responded adequately to these concerns, but have continued to exacerbate this problem by raising prices and employing practices such as unnecessarily issuing new editions of textbooks; and,

Given that faculty and students both share a concern about textbook affordability and its impact on student success; and,

Given that we must address this problem without undermining the academic freedom of faculty to choose course content;

Therefore, we state the following:

Read the rest...

Thought folks here would be interested in the material in the latest Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Here are the articles that interest me most, but they all look great:

Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances
Hugo Liu
A social network profile's lists of interests can function as an expressive arena for taste performance. Based on a semiotic approach, different types of taste statements are identified and further investigated through a statistical analysis of 127,477 profiles collected from MySpace.

Public Discourse, Community Concerns, and Civic Engagement: Exploring Black Social Networking Traditions on BlackPlanet.com
Dara N. Byrne
Participants on BlackPlanet are deeply committed to ongoing discussions about black community issues. However, none of these discussions moved beyond a discursive level of civic engagement, suggesting that the potential for mobilization through social networking online has not yet been realized.

The Creative Commons and Copyright Protection in the Digital Era: Uses of Creative Commons Licenses
Minjeong Kim
Using a mixed-methods approach, this study characterizes Creative Commons (CC) licensors, the ways that they produce creative works, and the private and public interests that CC licenses serve.

What do the following images suggest about argument on the internet?

Discussing these images might be a good classroom activity.

How cool is this?

The mission of The Ohio State University Press is to disseminate the best scholarship as widely as possible. Towards that end, we are making the complete texts of certain books available from our website. You will need the free Adobe Reader or some other PDF-enabled program to read the text.

All titles available this way, whether old or new, have gone through the exact same peer review process as our printed books. Any book that carries our imprint—no matter what medium is being used—has been approved by our Editorial Board after a thorough vetting process.

All such works remain under copyright protection and may not be used for any commercial purpose.

What a boon for teachers and students in literature courses. I'd love to see other university presses follow suit.

In 2003, SixApart released Movable Type version 2.6, which included options for Creative Commons licenses. At the time, I was (and still am) very impressed that Creative Commons licenses were built right into the code of a popular weblog software application. Yochai Benkler's framework of layers is applicable here; Movable Type has Creative Commons embedded into the logical (code) layer. Creative Commons' own use of metadata for RSS and searchable CC-licensed content is an instance of this as well.

I believe, if I'm not mistaken, that WordPress has a plugin that lets you choose a CC license within WordPress also, but will a WordPress user please confirm this? I have a wordpress.com account, and I poked around in the dashboard but couldn't find CC license selection anywhere in the options. Drupal has a Creative Commons module.

Finally, are there other weblog software apps which have CC license selection built into the core software code, or which have CC license selection plugins? Doesn't LiveJournal have a CC option now that they're affiliated with SixApart? This information will help me with a paper I'm revising.

Calling Planet Drupal and other experts -- Sharon could use a little help. I'll admit that I don't know how to install or upgrade Drupal myself; other people do it for me. I say that if Sharon actually installed Drupal herself, she's plenty tech savvy, and I'm impressed. From her post:

Perhaps the answers to my questions could be summed up with "People who aren't tech savvy ought not to be using Drupal," but I'm going to ask anyway. Does anyone have suggestions for ways to simplify the use of Drupal.

I'd like to add modules for wysiwyg text editing and other user-friendly options. I've found the Drupal handbooks and the Drupal discussion groups and reviews of various add-ons. The instructions themselves are not all that intuitive, though, and they seem to presume that they don't have to list all of the necessary steps in the process because anyone using this software would only need a brief prompt in the right direction.

About the wysiwyg text editor, I know Kairosnews used to have that, but I looked in the modules and couldn't find it. Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough or wasn't looking in the right place, though. Did something happen to that feature? (Cross-posted)

Zotero is a Firefox extension that helps you assemble and organize a bibliography, and it seems to be similar to CiteULike in some ways. I've installed it, but I haven't used it. Does anyone else here use it? Can you recommend some specific ways to use it? Zotero is just one of those things, like Quicksilver, Dreamweaver, and DevonThink, that I don't get (yet).

Here's a great idea: a petition you can sign for "the re-introduction and passage of the Federal Research Public Access Act, which calls for open public access to federally funded research findings within six months of publication in a peer-reviewed journal." The petition is sponsored by the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. Why hasn't anyone thought of this before? The existence of this petition makes me want to learn more about the Federal Research Public Access Act.

(Via Dorothea Salo.)

Paid internship at the Creative Commons headquarters in San Francisco! They have a Technology Internship and a Community + Media Development Internship. Only students are eligible -- undergraduate or graduate -- if I were still in graduate school, I'd be all over this one. Via the Free Culture blog.

Been meaning to pass this one along for a while -- via Dorothea Salo, a new journal called Open Access Research:

We have recently started Open Access Research (OAR) , a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that will enable greater interaction and facilitate a deeper conversation about open access, including topics such as:

* open access journals
* institutional support for open access
* open access publishing services and software
* open access repositories (both institutional and subject-based)
* electronic theses and dissertations
* the impact of open access on scholarly research and communications.

If you are engaged in research relating to open access, or if you have an article in mind, please contact us. OAR’s first issue will be in August, 2007 and will subsequently be published three times a year. Submissions received by March 31, 2007 will be considered for the August issue; subsequent submissions will be considered for future issues.

Send inquiries to:

William Walsh
Head – Acquisitions
Georgia State University Library
100 Decatur St. SE
Atlanta, GA 30303
wwalsh@gsu.edu

Editors-in-Chief: John Russell (University of Oregon), Dorothea Salo (George Mason University), William Walsh (Georgia State University), Elizabeth Winter (Georgia Institute of Technology). Please see our website for a full list of editors and editorial board members. Open Access Research is published by the Georgia State University Library using Open Journal Systems (http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs) software.

My institution is piloting Open Journal Systems; anyone here had experience with it?