Playing for Change

I just bought the Playing for Change CD/DVD. What a joy! While the Stand By Me video has received a lot of attention, the other songs and videos are as inspiring.

Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) - Reintroduced

Senators Lieberman and Cornyn have reintroduced the Federal Research Public Access Act (S. 1373), which would require agencies with large research budgets to develop public access plans to make the peer reviewed journal articles reporting the results of research funded by these agencies publicly accessible over the Internet. In essence, this bill would take a large step toward generalizing the principle established by the NIH Public Access Policy. This is great news. For more information about what you can do to support the bill, see the Alliance for Taxpayer Access page.

Josh Sarnoff's New Blog - Inherently Sarnoff

Congratulations to Josh Sarnoff, who joins the blogosphere with his new blog - Inherently Sarnoff. Josh is my colleague at the Washington College of Law, and he has interesting thoughts and perspectives to contribute to the online dialog about patent law and related matters. For those unfamiliar with patent law, the title of his blog refers to the doctrine of inherency under which a claimed invention can be found to fail the test of novelty because the invention, or one of its elements, is inherent in the prior art. Welcome Josh!

Professional Move - Au Revoir Villanova

My professional move from the Villanova School of Law to the American University, Washington College of Law became effective on June 1, 2009. I wanted to take a moment to express my gratitude to the Villanova community for having given me the opportunity to live and to work as a member. I had the opportunity to teach a wide range of interesting and interested students, some of whom are kind enough to subscribe to this blog :-)

I leave behind many friends on a great faculty. My faculty colleagues and Dean Sargent supported my scholarly activities with enthusiasm and were always generous with their time and attention when questions about teaching or other aspects of life in a law school arose.

The Villanova Law School has a distinctive, collegial culture, which I expect will thrive when it gets transplanted into a new building, this summer. Congratulations to all those who made the new building a reality!

When a professor moves to a new school, it is not a sharp transition because the professor remains colleagues with his former faculty members in the larger communities of legal education, higher education, and the legal profession. So this is not goodbye; simply au revoir.

Stuart Shieber's New Blog - Occasional Pamphlet

Stuart Shieber, Professor and Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication at Harvard,has started an open access blog, The Occasional Pamphlet. Stuart was responsible for shepherding the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences Open Access policy through the process. Stuart cares deeply about getting the architecture right for digital scholarly communication, and he has a number of creative ideas about how to move to a more open and productive environment for scholarly communication. Welcome Stuart!