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Authors To Universities: Give Up Your Google Books (paidcontent.org): In a surprise move, authors' groups slammed their one-time university partners with a lawsuit demanding that the schools' surrender digital collections and stop working with Google (NSDQ: GOOG). The lawsuit opens a new phase in the fight over digital libraries and comes the same week that Google's controversial books settlement is expected to die in court.     Click here

A Different Question of Open Access: Is There a Public Access Right to Academic Libraries in the United States and Canada? (aallnet.org): Providing public access to libraries is a public service, but is it a right? This paper explores participation in depository programs, public university status, and public funding as possible bases for this right. It examines relevant cases and finds that courts respect the right of academic libraries to determine their own policies.     Click here

Is the Apple iPad a Tablet? (pcmag.com): Competitors, analysts, and media have all called the iPad a tablet, but not Apple. The reason goes back to Steve Jobs' overall view of a tablet. As Windows tablets came out, he looked at them and thought, "people don't want that."     Click here

What smaller publishers, agents, and authors need to know about ebook publishing (idealog.com): As the shift from a print-centric book world to a digital one accelerates, more and more digital publishers are creating themselves. The biggest publishers, with the resources of sophisticated IT departments to guide them, have been in the game for years now and paying serious attention since the Kindle was launched by Amazon late in 2007. But as the market has grown, so has the ecosystem.     Click here

Publish-or-perish: Peer review and the corruption of science (guardian.co.uk): Pressure on scientists to publish has led to a situation where any paper, however bad, can now be printed in a journal that claims to be peer-reviewed. Peer review is the process that decides whether your work gets published in an academic journal. It doesn't work very well any more, mainly as a result of the enormous number of papers that are being published (an estimated 1.3 million papers in 23,750 journals in 2006). There simply aren't enough competent people to do the job.     Click here