ergophobe - 4:18 pm on Oct 3, 2005 (gmt 0)

Funny, the Google project was just on "On the Media" yesterday because of the Author's Guild lawsuit against Google. The main point of the commentator, whose name I didn't catch, was that this should be getting done by libraries, be open source and public domain.

Yet another case of Google finding itself solidifying its position as the new "Microsoft of the Mind", by which I mean, the company that occupies the mindspace of the dominating 500-pound gorilla that everyone loves to hate, but uses anyway.

The Yahoo mention of academic writing reminds me of the campaign launched by Bob Darnton (author of the Great Cat Massacre and president of the American Historical Association circa early 1990s. He felt that the academic publishing model had become economically untenable and that it was imperative to get rid of the stigma to publishing online by have electronic-only versions of peer-reviewed journals and books. He established a fund to award $30,000 (a huge award in a field like history) to one dissertation per year if the author agreed to never publish it in print. It never really took off, but with the academic slant to the Yahoo project, maybe we'll get there eventually.