Monday 12 May 2008

Pittsburgh hosts American Council of Learned Societies

The annual meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies was held in Pittsburgh last week and much of the program focused on the effects of the internet on scholarly communication and publishing as well as legal and political obstacles facing international scholars according to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. The agenda featured a panel discussion on the future of scholarly publishing during which Michael A. Keller, university librarian at Stanford, sparred with a philosopher who blamed libraries for playing along with commercial publishers' overpricing of journals in the science, technical, and medical fields, wreaking havoc with library budgets. "Libraries blew it," Mr. Keller agreed, "when they started shelling out for all the crap journals" distributed by the commercial-publishing giants.
The keynote lecture was delivered by Theodor Meron, Appeals Judge and former President, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and Charles L. Denison Professor of Law Emeritus and Judicial Fellow at NYU Law School; he is the first lawyer to be awarded the ACLS Charles Homer Haskins prize which recognizes distinguished humanists for a life of scholarly achievement.

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