For online music services, an endorsement from colleges is the kiss of death. Ruckus Network, in which more than 200 colleges had signed up with to provide a free and legal alternative to unauthorized file swapping, shut down without warning on February 6, reminding some officials of two years ago when another company, Cdigix, abruptly announced…

This spring, academic journals may turn the anti-plagiarism software that professors have been using against their students on the professors themselves. CrossRef, a publishing industry association, and the software company iParadigms announced a deal last week to create CrossCheck, an anti-plagiarism program for academic journals. The software…

A small, relatively new Indian university is making a name for itself--nationally and internationally--in the rapidly growing field of sustainable development. TERI University, the creation of one of India's leading environmentalists, has won praise from industry executives and academics alike. They say the institution is tackling some of the…

As the General Motors Corporation shuts assembly plants and veers toward bankruptcy, the lonely remnants of one of its top technological achievements--the first modern mass-produced electric car--lie scattered across a few dozen American college campuses. GM produced and leased to customers more than 1,000 "EV1" automobiles beginning in 1996. In…

Students still obtain most educational content through textbooks and other printed materials. But as technology has changed, they are able to gain access to more of that content digitally, and often illegally. As textbook costs have increased, students have begun scanning and illegally sharing books over peer-to-peer file-sharing networks to save…

Senior scholars, the A-list of academic publishing, seem to submit fewer unsolicited manuscripts to traditional humanities journals than they used to. The journal has become, with very few exceptions, the place where junior and midlevel scholars are placing their work. Technology and changing habits have called into question the nature of the…

This article features the reconstitution of the Place of Peace, a Buddhist temple disassembled in Japan, shipped in four containers across the Pacific Ocean, and reassembled in Furman University campus in South Carolina. How Furman decided to take on the project is an unusual tale. The temple once belonged to the Tsuzuki family, which owned and…

How should colleges deal with incidents of illegal file sharing on their campuses? At the Technology Forum, aspects of that question were discussed by Cheryl A. Elzy, dean of university libraries at Illinois State University; Jim Gibson, an associate professor of law at the University of Richmond; Stewart McLaurin, executive vice president for…

As students and alumni have crowded into campus career centers seeking help in their job searches, corporate recruiters have made themselves scarce. According to a recent survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, these are common symptoms during the economic downturn. Of the 50 or so colleges and universities the group surveyed…

The publishers' hall at the recent Association of College and Research Libraries conference, held in Seattle in mid-March, was a study in give-and-take: how much publishers such as Elsevier and Oxford University Press will give in this lousy economy, and how much budget-strapped librarians can take. Libraries are some of the biggest customers for…

A life-and-death battle is going on over public access to federally financed research--life for taxpayers and many scientists, and death for publishers. Or so each side claims. That battle, whose outcome will affect many university researchers, kicked into high gear on Capitol Hill on September 11, as the combatants debated the merits of a bill…

Professors select readings for their students in different forms: printed matter, including books and journals; print-on-demand texts; and online material. Before long, enough books and articles will be available for downloading onto devices like the Sony Reader and Amazon.com's new Kindle to make that format another option. They consider a wide…

A group of major universities has been quietly working for the past two years to build one of the largest online collections of books ever assembled, by pooling the millions of volumes that Google has scanned in its partnership with university libraries. One of the most important functions of the project, say its leaders, who unveiled the giant…

This article reports on the withdrawal of some universities' support of a music industry's campaign against music piracy on their campuses. Talk to the chief information officer at just about any American university, and he will probably say that his institution has bent over backward to help the Recording Industry Association of America curb…

This article reports that despite the doubts about education financing, Israel's innovative companies spun off by universities show no signs of slowing down, as new drugs and other discoveries have produced huge incomes. Thirty years ago, two researchers at Hebrew University set about to make a better tomato. One that was firmer, stayed fresher…