I went to go search the ERIC database just now for articles related to copyright law as it pertains to instructional materials. You know what? The most recent hit I got was from 2008! That’s unbelievable to me. It’s May 2010, and if I can’t get a scholarly article on this from 2010, we’ve got a serious problem with our academic journals. This situation is unacceptable and won’t be where students go if we can’t provide a much more up-to-date experience.
If I were to go to a lawyer about this situation, I sure hope that they would have more up-to-date materials than I currently have access to as a student.
Now I know that I could pick up many scholarly journals and look at articles from March, April, May 2010 at this point. But when did those ideas first get started? When were the articles written? When were they reviewed? When were they sent back for changes? When were they re-submitted? When did they finally make it into “print”? What’s the BEST we can do with printed journals? With online-based journals?
I’ll also grant you that I’m approaching this from somewhat of a tech-perspective — and technology always seems to outpace many other areas. But still…that all the more backs up my point here as we must move towards providing more up-to-date methods of sharing scholarly information.
Along these lines, I don’t want to read a textbook that is prior to 2009 — and ideally 2010 — at this point. In my area of work, I need up-to-date methods, techniques, information, skills.
We need more avenues that are similar to:
- JSTOR
- Artstore
- Creative Commons
