Ebooks: Scandal or Market Economics webinar – summary and links | UCL Open@UCL Blog
flavoursofopenscience's bookmarks 2021-03-17
Summary:
On Monday 15th March, the UCL Office for Open Science & Scholarship hosted a webinar in conjunction with Copyright4Knowledge that aimed to examine the acute difficulties for higher education and public libraries caused by publishers’ pricing and licensing practices and discuss some possible solutions.
For the session we had over 600 attendees from countries across the globe including UK, Switzerland, Canada, South Africa, Norway, Ireland, Germany, Spain, USA, and the Netherlands. This level of interest highlights the way in which the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to a head issues surrounding the online provision of learning resources, not just in the UK, but globally.
In the session we played host to three expert speakers who have written up their experiences for a new article on the LSE Impact blog. Below you can access the individual slide decks for each speaker, and at the bottom of this brief discussion you can access a list of cited resources and a few shared in the chat, plus the full recording of the session.
- Johanna Anderson, @hohojanna, Subject Librarian from the University of Gloucestershire and founder of the #eBookSoS campaign: Johanna Anderson’s slides
- Dr. Paul Ayris, @ucylpay, Pro-Vice-Provost (UCL Library Services & UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship): Paul Ayris’s slides
- Ben White, Chair of the Copyright and Legal Working Group of the European Research Library Association (LIBER): Ben White’s slides
The discussion in the chat was very active, with attendees sharing their own experiences and comments in support of the points that the speakers were making. The audience shared their own experiences of troubles caused by ebooks, with issues such as only half of the books in a key series being available in an ebook format, multiple examples of academics needing to rewrite module reading lists either to use books that the library already had or give several options for librarians to try locate since many were not easily available. In one instance an academic was told that she couldn’t use her own book in a course because it wasn’t available to buy as an ebook!
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