The world’s leading cancer charity to stop funding open access publishing because of hybrid journals
As numerous posts on this blog have emphasised, the underlying idea of open access (OA) – allowing anyone to read and share published academic research for free –…
Walled Culture the book, three years on
Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) was launched just over three years ago. A few weeks afterwards, I talked with journalist and editor Maria Bustillos about…
The long road to Marrakesh: 40 years of copyright obstruction to human rights and social justice
One of the little-known but extremely telling episodes in the history of modern copyright, discussed in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available), concerns the Marrakesh Treaty.…
Fans of open access, unite: you have nothing to lose but your chained libraries
When books were rare and extremely expensive, they were often chained to the bookcase to prevent people walking off with them, in what were known as “chained libraries”.…
Yes, let’s “Make it Fair” – by recognising that copyright has failed to reward creators properly
A few weeks ago, the UK’s regional and national daily news titles ran similar front covers, exhorting the government there to “Make it Fair”. The campaign Web site…
From DeepSeek to Stargate: How dramatic AI developments will re-shape the copyright landscape
Walled Culture started covering generative AI relatively early, back in October 2022. That’s just two years ago, and yet the technological progress since then has been extraordinary, whatever…
The truth about copyright: even successful authors can’t live on the royalties publishers pay them
Copyright is built on a lie that most people seem to accept: artists can make a decent living from the current system of rewards that copyright provides. As…
Juicy licensing deals with AI companies show that publishers don’t really care about creators
One of the many interesting aspects of the current enthusiasm for generative AI is the way that it has electrified the formerly rather sleepy world of copyright. Where…
Another sign that gold open access was a mistake, and that diamond open access is the future
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is one of the most influential funding bodies in the world. According to one ranking, it is the second largest charitable foundation,…
The link tax’s failure to deliver meaningful benefits is a lesson for the copyright industry
It seems so long ago that people were trying to stop the worst aspects of the EU Copyright Directive. It was quite a battle, as Chapter 6 of…
OCLC says “what is known must be shared”, but sues Anna’s Archive to stop it sharing knowledge
Back in March, Walled Culture wrote about the terrible job that academic publishers are doing in terms of creating backups of the articles they publish. We also mentioned…
Yet more examples of how copyright destroys culture rather than driving it [Updated]
One of the supposed justifications for the intellectual monopoly called copyright is that it drives creativity and culture. In the last few weeks alone we have had multiple…
We are losing vast swathes of our digital past, and copyright stops us saving it
It is hard to imagine the world without the Web. Collectively, we routinely access billions of Web pages without thinking about it. But we often take it for…
Here’s another way that AI will reduce ad income for publishers – and what they can do about it
New ways in which the latest AI technology can be applied are popping up all the time. Here’s an interesting example discussed by Ben Werdmuller on his blog,…
Publisher wants $2,500 to allow academics to post their own manuscript to their own repository
As a Walled Culture explained back in 2021, open access (OA) to published academic research comes in two main varieties. “Gold” open access papers are freely available to…
Ebook pledge aims to protect libraries and authors from publishers’ growing abuse of copyright
There’s a whole chapter of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) devoted to the serious attack on libraries and their traditional functions that is being carried…