By Jennifer Howard. Librarians love to get free books into the hands of scholars and students who need them. Publishers love it when their books find readers—but they also need to cover the costs of turning an idea into a finished monograph. Now a nonprofit group called Knowledge Unlatched is trying out a new open-access model designed to make both librarians and publishers happy. More...

By Steve Kolowich. The University of Illinois at Chicago recently found itself living a modern nightmare: Google’s automated cybersecurity regime mistook the university as the culprit in a spam attack on the university’s students and began blocking university email accounts from sending messages to Gmail users. The blocking went on for more than two weeks, and the affected Gmail users included 13,000 of the university’s own students. University officials describe those two weeks as a Kafkaesque state of limbo. More...

By Lawrence Biemiller. Following the defection of several participating universities, the online-course provider 2U and its remaining partners in the experimental Semester Online program have decided to shut it down following this summer’s courses. Semester Online promised to offer live online class sessions from prestigious institutions, but after uneasy faculty members at institutions like Duke University and Washington University in St. Louis forced administrators to back away from the experiment, the remaining partners voted on Wednesday to discontinue it. More...

By Lawrence Biemiller. Diana G. Oblinger, president and chief executive officer of the education-technology consortium Educause, will retire in March 2015, the organization said on Thursday. Ms. Oblinger, who has been president of the 2,400-member group since 2008, oversaw the creation of Educause’s first online events and its program of Next Generation Learning Challenges grants, which has distributed nearly $55-million to date. More...