What if Microsoft demanded a 30 per cent cut of your speaking fees if you happened to make use of a PowerPoint presentation in your talk? What if you used Photoshop to edit your photos and Adobe only allowed you to sell your creations through their online photo store? Sound crazy? That's what Apple is up to with their new iBook Author software.

A soft spoken street vendor has become the face of a new promotional campaign by Megaphone, a magazine sold on the streets of Vancouver.

The campaign called "I Work Here" features three videos of vendors on the job. In the first video projected yesterday at the intersection of Robson and Howe Streets in Vancouver's downtown core, we meet Peter Thompson, a 53 year-old former carpenter, who began selling the paper six days a week in 2006, to help make ends meet.

A recent article by George Monbiot in The Guardian takes a critical look at academic publishers, apparently with a focus on the United Kingdom. The article makes the following points:

- Journals now eat up 65 per cent of university library budgets.

- "[A]cademic publishers get their articles, their peer reviewing (vetting by other researchers) and even much of their editing for free."

- The research published by academic publishers is largely funded by publicly-funded research grants.