boycott

Planning a conference is a pain in the neck.  There are loads of details to attend to and the only time you get a little relief is when you can cross tasks off that long, long to-do list.  Now imagine learning that clergy, women's groups, labor organizations, immigrants' rights networks and others are urging individuals to boycott the venue where your conference is scheduled.  You signed that hotel contract ages ago, paid that hefty deposit and crossed that item off your list.  What a dilemma.  It's the exact one faced in the last few weeks by the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization (ADAO…
Economic recovery has not yet made its presence felt at public universities in California. (Indeed, at least in the California State University system, all things budgetary are going to be significantly worse in the next academic year, not better.) This means it's not a great time for purveyors of electronic journals to present academic libraries in public university systems with big increases in subscription prices. Yet Nature Publishing Group has, apparently, done just that by some 400%. And, as noted by Christina Pikas and Dorothea Salo and Jennifer Howard in The Chronicle of Higher…