The L Word: JSTOR by any other name...

JSTOR and Ithaka Merge

JSTOR (www.jstor.org) and Ithaka (www.ithaka.org) have announced the merger of their organizations. The new combined enterprise will be called Ithaka and will be dedicated to helping the academic community use digital technologies to advance scholarship and teaching and to reducing systemwide costs through collective action. 

More from Ithaka here.

More logos, brands: Aluka - Portico - NITLE. 

snip:

"Increasingly we are approached for help on a range of initiatives that seek to leverage this investment...” said Guthrie.

Update via AKMA: Jo Guldi's constructive vision for Journals that take seriously what it means to disseminate.

fuck you all and to all a good night

“University Publishing in a Digital Age” – a report sponsored by Ithaka and JSTOR.. . . was released late last week. On Thursday, IHE ran a detailed and informative article about the Ithaka Report, as I suppose it is bound to be known in due time. The groups that prepared the document propose the creation of “a powerful technology, service, and marketing platform that would serve as a catalyst for collaboration and shared capital investment in university-based publishing.”

Clearly this would be a vaster undertaking than JSTOR, even. The Ithaka Report may very well turn out to be a turning point in the recent history, not only of scholarly publishing, but of scholarship itself. Scott McLemee, "Sailing from Ithaka" (bolding mine). See also here, here ($), here, etc.

From the Ithaka report:

“A shared electronic publishing infrastructure across universities could allow them to save costs, create scale, leverage expertise, innovate, unite the resources of the university (e.g. libraries, presses, faculty, student body, IT), extend the brand of American higher education (and each particular university within that brand), create a blended interlinked environment of fee-based to free information, and provide a robust alternative to commercial competitors.” (italics mine)

Guess the report has thought of everything...

- pregnant pause -

except how, freed from the shackles of intellectual proprietorship, shared scholarship could allow universities to educe, enlighten and empower the human imagination.

Update: blogs take up the Ithaka report: Dorothea, Free Range Librarian, MediaCommons.

Dorothea: "Bite the bullet and go open-access."