This paper examines the issues associated with educational policy and distance education. New forms of distance education portend a change for student populations, while encouraging faculty to develop new modalities of teaching and administrators to provide a new infrastructure of support. As a result, the advent of distance education is forcing…

The origins and current use of H-Net, an online humanities network on the World Wide Web, are examined. H-Net currently sponsors 73 electronic discussion lists that reach subscribers in 68 countries. Discussion groups have not met expectations for scholarly exchange, possibly because of plagiarism and copyright concerns. New ventures include book…

Two articles consider different aspects of the issue of protecting intellectual property rights. The first discusses the effects of a recent court ruling on information centers in the for-profit sector, focusing on fair use under the Copyright Act of 1976; and the second examines moral and economic issues in electronic information dissemination.…

The American Association of University Professors' report on intellectual property rights summarizes federal copyright law on issues that concern faculty: ownership; commercialization; revenue distribution; works created for colleges and universities; fair use; traditional, electronic, and multimedia materials; Internet/World Wide Web; digital…

This publication details the critical issues being debated in telecommunications today and their impact on colleges and universities in the future. An introduction identifies important changes in recent years including technological advances, the digitizing of communication, privatization and commercialization of the Internet, possible significant…

The first program session, "Exercising Fair Use Rights in the '90s and Beyond," addressed the exercise of fair use rights, focusing on intellectual property management with special emphasis on the rights and perspectives of users, librarians, and educational institutions. The second session, "Organizational Change and…

U.S. patent laws have undergone many changes in recent years, both through Congress and the courts. This article summarizes recent developments relating to judicial decisions, legislative initiatives, and patent office policy, and provides some practical advice relating to administration of intellectual property. As illustrated by the latest…

An academic planning conference is reported, with articles included on several topics pertaining to faculty members. A summary and agenda of the 1979 conference on "Ethical and Economic Issues Concerning Academic Professionalism and Compensation in an Era of Accountability, Limits, and Inflation" are presented. An article on faculty…

Chairpersons of governing boards were surveyed regarding the policies and practices related to extra-income-earning activities of faculty at their institutions. The results are preliminary since more data are still being collected. A total of 176 institutions were surveyed, ranging from two-year colleges and specialized professional schools to…

This document, a summary of reports presented at the 1998 annual symposium of the Forum for the Future of Higher Education, covers a wide range of issues that are likely to influence how colleges and universities deal with such questions as what business they are actually in, what are their institutional strengths, how will they compete in a…

The 10 papers in this collection discuss the database industry in Australia and New Zealand, networking activities in the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) region, intellectual property protection of databases, the development of land information systems in Australia, the development of expert systems, the use of optical data disks,…

Examines legal and ethical issues related to Internet use and use of other technologies in Native American communities. Discusses conflict between federal telecommunications policy and the principles of tribal sovereignty, cultural appropriation, intellectual property rights, gatekeeping to limit access to traditional knowledge, and effects of…

Discusses the following challenges institutions must consider as they enter the new marketplace of distributed learning: library access, faculty workload, faculty incentives, faculty-support structures, intellectual property, articulation agreements, financial aid, pricing, cross-subsidization of programs, institutional loyalty and philanthropy,…

How universities and university people deal with plagiarism is articulated in universities' plagiarism policies. Universities, policies and people are all located in a bigger context, one which is being increasingly shaped by global issues. Some global issues of particular relevance to plagiarism are associated with the Internet and its attendant…

This essay examines the future directions of university education in Europe, focusing on technology and the information revolution as the driving forces behind educational change. Whereas the mission of universities in the past was to accumulate, refine, and pass on knowledge, their new task is to educate and train people to manage and gain access…