The University of California Press and JSTOR announced a new joint project called the Current Scholarship Program, to debut in 2011.  The system is devoted to providing a cost-effective way for libraries to access scholarly journals published by UC Press.  Other publishers are invited to participate.

More information is available on the JSTOR press release.

According to a press release from the company Recap, it has created a free extension for Firefox that improves the experience of using PACER, the electronic public access system for the U.S. Federal District and Bankruptcy Courts.  PACER contains the docket sheets and many documents filed with the federal courts.

The press release states: "RECAP is an extension to the popular Firefox web browser that gives PACER users a hassle-free way to contribute to a free, open repository of federal court records. When a RECAP user purchases a document from PACER, the RECAP extension helps her automatically send a copy of that document to the RECAP archive. And RECAP saves its users money by notifying them when documents they’re searching for are already available for free from the public archive."

You may learn more about how the extention work directly from the Recap website.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Open Humanities Press (OHP) and the University of Michigan Library's Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO) announced a book series on literary and cultural theory.  The web page for the book series explains that each book will be freely available on the web and may also be purchased in a paperback format.  The contents of the the site is licensed under an open access creative commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License, which allows others to copy, distribute and adapt each work, with the condition that the reader must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

Read more about the book series through the Library's subscription to the Chronicle of Higher Education

The book series is available online the OHP website.

West casebooks in the American Casebook Series will soon look very different.  The casebooks will change from the dark brown color to charcoal gray.  Most importantly, the new cover is made from a 100% natural fiber and vegetable-based inks. 

Here's an example of the new cover:











And an example of the old cover: