Copyright Continues to Crumble; Ebooks Libertated from DRM; Gatekeepers Quake

From Reason:

Science Fiction Publisher Liberates Its E-Books

Katherine Mangu-Ward | April 24, 2012

Tor/Forge, the rather libertarian science fiction publishing house I profiled in “Tor’s World Without Death or Taxes,” has decided to eliminate digital rights management from their e-books: […]

Other recent news:

Science Fiction Publisher Liberates Its E-Books

See also The wealthiest university on Earth can’t afford its academic journal subscriptions:

Yes, you read that right. According to a memorandum issued last week by Harvard Library’s Faculty Advisory Council, the cost of its peer-reviewed journal subscriptions has become prohibitively expensive.

What does it say about the world of academic publishing, the accessibility of knowledge, and the flow of information when the richest academic institution on the planet cannot afford to continue paying for its peer-reviewed journal subscriptions?

And see Glyn Moody’s Techdirt post: Open Access And The Art Of Contract Hacking:

Open Access continues to gain momentum, as more and more researchers seek to make their work freely available online. One way of doing that is by modifying the contract that academic publishers routinely send to potential authors, inserting a clause that allows digital copies to be distributed.

That’s been working quite well, but some publishers are starting to object, as Freedom To Tinker blogger Andrew Appel discovered recently (link found via BoingBoing.) The Association of Computing Machinery, which claims to be “the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society“, sent him an email that stated it “does not accept copyright Addenda that exceed the liberal rights retained by authors under ACM’s Copyright Policy and the exclusive grant of copyright to ACM as publisher”.

But Appel has come up with a neat idea for getting round this block: […]

Update: See Duke Scholars Join Boycott Against Elsevier; Even Harvard Can’t Afford Subscriptions To Academic Journals; Pushes For Open Access.