By Tracy Mitrano. Having returned from last week’s national EDUCAUSE conference, I am left with the question of what happened to its D.C. Policy Office. When I first assumed my role at Cornell in IT Policy and Law, it was a robust center of ideas, action and commentary on an array of IT policy issues for higher education. Led by Mark Luker, who had been a well-respected CIO before moving to association life in D.C., it featured Steve Worona and Rodney Petersen who very ably and responsively assisted colleges and universities across the country with everything from the development of institutional IT policy to national policy issues. Read more...

By Tracy Mitrano. The higher education community, including its associations, has a chicken and an egg conundrum with respect to major political policy issues. Copyright is one of them, and perhaps one of the most significant. 
As both producers and consumers of "intellectual property," higher education leadership tends to play a wary game when it comes to the national policy scene.  To be sure, it will -- and darn well should -- defend itself against legal attacks: Georgia State and Hathi Trust are examples.  But caught in that conundrum, the community only reacts.  With few exceptions -- Professor Samuelson's Center at Berkeley for example, or the Stanford Law Clinic and Harvard’s Berkman Center, high education does not lead. Read more...

By Barbara Fister. I posted an admittedly rather cranky bit of finger-shaking at Library Journal’s Peer to Peer Review last week chiding academic librarians who can’t be bothered to make their work open access. It seems hypocritical for professionals in our field to advocate for open access without practicing it ourselves. It’s also detrimental to our discipline. Most research in our field is undertaken in order to improve practice. Many academic librarians work in libraries that don't have access to many LIS journals because our collections are shaped around the curriculum, and we don't offer degrees in the field. It’s hard to improve our practice without access to the discipline's research findings. Besides, if we go through the relatively simple steps to make our work open access, we’ll have experiential knowledge about the process that will help us help scholars in other fields who want to make their work available to all. Read more...