February 2008
- Authors: Pearson manipulates royalties
- 2008 TAA Conference to feature 'Roundtable Discussions'
- Textbook Track: 'A Play of Words: Acting Out Contract Negotiations, Part II'
- General Session: 'Further Orientation to Las Vegas: Seven Things You Should Know About Casinos'
- General Session: 'Don't Get MAD: The Joys and Heartaches of Co-Authorship'
- Quizlet makes learning vocabulary words easy
- Indiana University, Bloomington Libraries publish first e-journal
- Harvard jumps into open access arena
- On-the-job training
Authors: Pearson manipulates royalties
Courtland L. Bovee and John V. Thill, authors of Excellence in Business Communication and Buisness Communication Today, filed suit on January 7, 2008 against Pearson Education, Inc. and its subsidiary Prentice Hall in the United States District Court, Southern District of New York alleging that the company has systemically breached its contracts with the authors and acted in bad faith in order to minimize the royalties it pays them.
"Ever since Pearson Education became the corporate parent of Prentice Hall, we have noticed changes in the way in which our royalties are paid," said John Thill. The suit alleges that there is a pattern of misstating and miscategorizing sales so that Pearson can maximize its own profits at the expense of its authors.
The lawsuit alleges, among other things, that despite specific contract provisions related to sales by Pearson Education subsidiaries, the defendants purport to license Bovee and Thill's works to its foreign subsidiary companies for sale in foreign markets in order to pay royalties based upon a much lower license fee rather than upon the volume of sales.
The suit also alleges that Pearson engages in the systematic discounting of Bovee and Thill LLC works. Rather than calculating royalties on the "single copy price" of plantiff's textbooks, Pearson Education arbitrarily sets an unreasonably high "list price" for plaintiff's books in order to take advantage of contractual royalty provisions related to "high discount sales."
Finally, Bovee & Thill take issue with Pearson Education's treatment of "custom published" editions of their work. Resembling allegations that have been made by other authors against Pearson and other publishers, Bovee & Thill's lawsuit alleges that Pearson Ecuation reduced its royalty payments by categorizing custom published works as "abridgements," in order to apply a lower royalty rate to their sale.
Said Thill: "Everyone knows that custom published works are not 'abridgements.'" The suit alleges that Pearson Education ignores such accepted industry definitions so that they can retain more profits for themselves. "In our case, this practice results in the reduction of our royalties by about one third," he said.
Bijan Amini of Storch & Munves, the firm representing Bovee and Thill, said: "Adding insult to injury, Pearson Education has consistently refused our clients adequate access to their books and records".
2008 TAA Conference to feature 'Roundtable Discussions'
The 2008 TAA Conference will feature several Roundtable Discussions, including Self-Publishing; Preparing for the Next Edition; Deciphering Your Royalty Statement; K-12 Authoring and Publishing; Working with Co-Authors; Creating a Successful Author-Editor Relationship; an Open Discussion for Non-Tenured Professors and Those New to Higher Education; and Share Near-Finished Article Drafts with 'Little-e experts' and 'Capital-E Experts': Click here
Textbook Track: 'A Play of Words: Acting Out Contract Negotiations, Part II'
Authoring Attorney Michael Lennie, Jan Kardys, a former director of contracts at several major publishers, and Christopher Kenneally, director of author relations for the Copyright Clearance Center, will share their insight into contract negotiations: Click here
General Session: 'Further Orientation to Las Vegas: Seven Things You Should Know About Casinos'
Where did cards come from? Who really started the Las Vegas Strip? What's the relationship between organized crime and gambling? What's the best bet in the casino? The worst? Why are casinos so big? Weaving together history, practical math, and Las Vegas lore, this session by David Schwartz, director of gaming research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, makes casinos a little less mysterious: Click here
General Session: 'Don't Get MAD: The Joys and Heartaches of Co-Authorship'
No one ever sets out to co-author a work with their first enemy, but when a collaboration goes bad that's where you can end up if you haven't planned for that possibility. Stephen E. Gillen, an authoring attorney with Greenebaum Doll & McDonald, a long-time TAA member, and member of the TAA Council, knows all too well that disputes among co-authors are more likely to result in Mutually Assured Destruction ("MAD") than in a successful outcome for one author or the other. He explains what can go wrong, and provides tips for how authors can plan for the best even while preparing for the worst: Click here
Quizlet makes learning vocabulary words easy
Point your students to Quizlet for an easy way to learn vocabulary words. They enter a vocabulary list of any words or data, and Quizlet gives them a specialized learning mode, flashcards, randomly generated tests, and collaboration tools for classmates. It's free to sign up: http://quizlet.com
Indiana University, Bloomington Libraries publish first e-journal
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Through a partnership that marks a turning point in scholarly publishing at Indiana University, Ruth Lilly Dean of University Libraries Patricia Steele announced on February 21 the publication of Museum Anthropology Review, the first faculty-generated electronic journal supported by the IU Bloomington Libraries.
Edited by Jason Baird Jackson, associate professor in IU's Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Museum Anthropology Review showcases a new model for Bloomington faculty to disseminate their scholarly work.
With this pilot test, the IU Bloomington libraries are poised to support the electronic publication of journals, offering faculty editors a low-cost solution to the administrative and publishing functions of managing them. This expands the scope of IUScholarWorks, a set of services to make the work of IU scholars freely available, maximizing exposure and visibility of publications by making articles accessible to search services such as Google Scholar.
"Libraries nationwide are interested in supporting faculty who can realize the benefits of publishing open-access journals," Steele said. "At IU, we're especially pleased to help advance one of the university's top disciplines. And by partnering locally, we're disseminating scholarship that will help researchers worldwide."
Steele said that universities, and particularly libraries, have been squeezed in recent years by a system in which the cost of acquiring journals from commercial publishers has grown increasingly more expensive.
Double-digit price increases forced upon library subscribers over the past decade have allowed commercial publishers to steadily grow their profits at the expense of university budgets. The library community contends that one approach to control runaway costs is to minimize the dependence on subscription-based models by publishing and promoting the use of freely available, or open access, journals.
Jackson founded Museum Anthropology Review on the basis of his experiences as editor of an established closed-access journal in his field -- the similarly titled and focused Museum Anthropology. Unlike Museum Anthropology Review, this more established journal is published by the American Anthropological Association in a partnership with the for-profit publisher Wiley-Blackwell.
"The costs associated with publishing in the traditional mode are astronomical," Jackson said. "Publication of a single research article in Museum Anthropology can cost thousands of dollars and, when published, the results will then be available to a small proportion of people worldwide."
Jackson said that making scholarly work more easily and affordably accessible is especially important in fields like folklore and anthropology that are rooted in the study of local cultures worldwide.
"If, for instance, a scholar spends months documenting the work of an elderly woodcarver living in a small American town and then writes about what she learned in a peer-reviewed research article, I have an obligation as her editor to make it as easy as possible for the schoolchildren of that town -- or the artist's grandchildren -- to gain access to her writing. Open access repositories and journals, in their varied forms, help make this possible."
Begun in February 2007 as a pilot project using weblog software, Museum Anthropology Review published 64 contributions from scholars worldwide. The works were consulted more than 20,000 times, Jackson said, and for many of the books that were reviewed in the journal, the assessments published in Museum Anthropology Review are the most highly ranked pages in standard Web searches.
"Everyone involved with the effort has been thrilled with the results," Jackson said, "and I am happy to be continuing the project in a more durable and robust way through our partnership with the IUB Libraries."
IUScholarWorks is a set of services supported by the IU Libraries and the Digital Library Program, a collaborative effort of the IU Libraries and University Information Technology Services. For more information, go to scholarworks.iu.eduHarvard jumps into open access arena
A Feb. 13 article in Inside Higher Ed announces a new open access plan by Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The department will be posting its faculty's finished academic papers online free, unless they choose to opt out of the plan. Read the entire article: Click here
On-the-job training
Four colleagues share their experiences as first-time faculty members in the department of teaching and learning at Northern Illinois University's College of Education, in the Jan. 29 online issue of "The Chronicle of Higher Education": Click here
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