No one is sure why some electronic journals are having difficulty getting papers and subscriptions from scholars, but several theories have been voiced. Scholars are concerned that electronic publishing will fail, or that electronically published articles will not contribute to tenure and promotion. However, some journals are having considerable…

Economic pressures in the publishing industry are causing faculty to write shorter books. The authors want their books to be readable, and publishers want to reduce costs and make the books affordable for a wider audience, including students. Brief but broad surveys, short introductory primers, quick biographies, and books with very basic themes…

Colleges and universities are establishing policies to ensure that clothing carrying their names are not being manufactured with "sweatshop" labor. The colleges' policies attempt to set acceptable standards for manufacturers producing the lucrative licensed lines. However, institutions are finding that it is difficult to enforce those…

Discusses how a Supreme Court decision last year in "The New York Times Company v. Jonathan Tasini" has led publishers to make massive purges of archival material in newspaper databases, rendering them unreliable for many scholars. (EV)

A civil engineering professor would like to see civil engineers spend less time looking at broken structures and more time testing construction materials, and has founded a research center for that purpose. (MSE)

An annual bus trip around Georgia that orients new University of Georgia faculty members to the state, its industries, and its people, and the faculty response to the experience are described. (MSE)

The Foundation Center is a non-profit, independent organization formed and funded by grant-makers to keep track of how foundations use their money and to make the information available to the public. It will soon expand to publishing books to increase public understanding of philanthropy, develop electronic communication and computer-based…

The Gourman Report, a guide to colleges and universities self-published since 1967, has largely been ignored by educators because its methodology is unclear and of questionable validity. Now, backed by a major test-preparation company and published by a major publisher, critics are concerned that it will gain legitimacy. The newest edition ranks…

Scholarly publishers are experimenting with the "electronic monograph," a scholarly book offered on the Internet. Several converging trends (declining university subsidies, increasing research specialization, tightening library budgets) are putting pressure on academic publishing in the humanities and social sciences. Publishers are not convinced…

The unauthorized reproduction of printed material in electronic form, particularly using optical scanning, is rising and would be impossible to monitor. The publishing industry is trying to establish the extent of the trend and determine how to cope with the copyright problems it raises. (MSE)

A lawsuit against Kinko's, a nationwide chain of photocopying stores, is expected to be filed soon. The target of the lawsuit is photocopied anthologies used by professors to supplement textbooks or to substitute for them altogether. There is evidence that anthologies have been produced without permission of copyright owners. (MLW)

Publishers are suing Kinko's Graphics Corporation for copyright violation, claiming that they illegally reproduced "substantial portions" of 12 books and included them in anthologies made for professors at Columbia University, the New School for Social Research, and New York University. Off campus copy shops represent a major threat to…

Increasingly, college textbooks written to the specifications of individual professors are being produced on demand by custom publishers, often prepared very quickly to contain up-to-date information. Students prefer them to photocopied packets of readings. The trend is a reaction to the emergence of information-on-demand computer networks. (MSE)

Dollar amounts of federal, state, industry, institutional, and other financial support for research in fiscal 1985 are reported for the top 91 receiving institutions individually and for all institutions together. (MSE)

A study has found that scholarly journal subscriptions have risen over 18 percent in 1986-87, with a few publishers accounting for most of the increase. Some feel publishers are charging as much as the market can bear. Libraries are beginning to share subscriptions and collections more. (MSE)