scoped to a particular domain.

Most to-do lists give you no control over your data. Your tasks live inside the app, not in a document you can edit, and syncing is handled by whichever company made the app. If you don't like this, todo.txt is a great alternative.

But given that most of this peer review is already done without compensation, it is not tethered to the existing system of journals. A better system for disseminating scientific knowledge in the modern age would not include paywalls and subscription fees. Instead, we should aspire to a truly open science, one that is both more efficient and higher quality than the current system.

Thomas "Tom" Russ Dillon

O’Reilly Media, Inc., 1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA95472.

a study by the Connecticut Board of Governors for Higher Education published in 2006 found that only 58 percent of Connecticut state schools’ faculty knew how much the books they selected for their classes cost.

“bizarre” “triple-pay” system, in which “the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product”.

Still, she misses some of the resources traditional publishers offer. Before she switched to LibreText, her old textbook came with adaptive quizzes—which can help students identify what they need to spend more time studying—and she says they worked well. But at the same time, some of her students weren’t able to access those resources, because they weren’t able to purchase the textbook in the first place. “It’s sort of a catch-22,” she says. “It was improving student success—but only in those who could afford to buy it.”

benefits

Textbook Example of Unbundling

High-end digital products that directly or indirectly improve student outcomes Related services that help colleges improve student outcomes Services that help colleges improve the unsexy but critical aspects staying viable, from marketing to administration Loans to schools looking to make changes that will (theoretically) make them more sustainable in the long run but require significant up-front investment—preferably in the products and services of the company offering the loan

Unbundling of Textbook Publishers

The general rule at a TLT is that if you’ve had an eight year run without getting disbanded or dissolved due to faculty pressure you’ve had a good run, and it might be time to brush up that CV because it can’t possibly last. It’s worth noting as well that TLTs are usually disbanded as a way for institutional leadership to gain favor with faculty.

THE NEW FACE OF THE TEXTBOOK MONOPOLY

Open access: All human knowledge is there—so why can’t everybody access it?

Academic Publishing is a Goddamned Exploitative Farce

All six editors and all 31 editorial board members of Lingua, one of the top journals in linguistics, last week resigned to protest Elsevier’s policies on pricing and its refusal to convert the journal to an open-access publication that would be free online. As soon as January, when the departing editors’ noncompete contracts expire, they plan to start a new open-access journal to be called Glossa.”

What Open-Access Publishing Actually Costs

77 cents of every dollar spent on textbooks go to publishers. Of those 77 cents, the publishing company makes about 18 cents in pure profit, while spending 15 cents on marketing, and roughly 32 percent to cover costs (paper, printing, employee salaries, etc). At the same time, the author - the person who dedicated hundreds of hours of research to write the book – only gets about 12 cents on the dollar on average.

All these worries stem from a transfer of power: from publisher to platform; from content creator to content distributor

For example, imagine you are annotating the second page of a New York Times article. You probably want to see your annotation when you are looking at the article later as a single page, right? Or perhaps you've annotated the HTML for a PLOS ONE article. Wouldn't you like to see those annotations when you are looking at the PDF version of the same article? If annotations were only associated with the URL you happened to be looking at in your browser then the scenarios above would not work, because the documents being annotated all have different URLs.