News release: “Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced it added five new subject areas to its Legacy eBook Collection on ScienceDirect. The Legacy Collection consists of digitized, classic scholarly book content, now including nearly 13,000 books. The new subject areas are arts and humanities; computer science; economics, econometrics and finance; immunology and microbiology; and mathematics. In addition, there are newly digitized books in the engineering and the biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biology collections. The Legacy Collection includes books with contributions from notable authors like leading business management thinker Peter Drucker, and Nobel Laureates such as Lev Davidovich Landau, George Olah, Peter Diamond  and Sir Frank McFarlane Burnet. For the first time, the books in the Elsevier’s Legacy Collection are also being made available to more than 70 third-party ebook distributors. Customers can purchase these revived titles through online retailers or through library ebook service providers.”

• Via Boing Boing: “Elsevier is one of the world’s largest scholarly publishers and one of the most bitter enemies that open access publishing has; SSRN is one of the biggest open access scholarly publishing repositories in the world: what could possibly go wrong? As renowned security academic Matt Blaze pointed out in a series of tweets, there is a common misconception about the role scholarly publishers play in research: the publishers don’t pay a cent towards the research, nor do they compensate the researchers for publishing their work; but they do represent a huge cost-center for scholarly institutions in the form of subscription charges, which continue to increase far ahead of inflation. Scholarly publishers are in the business of charging money to show the public the results of research that the public paid to undertake. Elsevier says that nothing will change at SSRN, but there’s good cause to be skeptical: it’s like if Monsanto bought out your favorite organic farm co-op…”