Most interesting reads today

Here are a few of the more interesting things I've read today:

• MLA Shift on Copyright - Modern Language Association changing its agreements with authors to allow the authors to keep the copyright.
• Paying for Performance - McGraw-Hill agreeing with the Western Governors University to base the fees for its textbooks on the outcomes of the students who use them.  This may be a sweetheart deal, because it enables the publisher access to outcomes data (properly anonymized, of course), which it can use to modify the content.  This suggests an interesting shift in the publisher-institution relationship.
• Not Just Degrees - a summary of a report on the growth of college-based certificates and their impact on workers' incomes.  This represents an under-explored function of higher education (not only in the community colleges, but also the 4-year institutions).  What's interesting is that the impact of the certificates were greatest in the male-dominated fields.  With the decline of male enrollments, this may represent an adjustment to the market of higher education.
• What Should a Year of College Cost? - from Confessions of a Community College Dean, this post poses problems with all the potential bases on which the cost of higher education could be based.  
• Intellectual Freedom and the Library as a Workplace - from Library Babel Fish, an attempt to understand how librarians can straddle the faculty/administration divide, proclaiming to support intellectual freedom while toting the admin line.  
• and of course, Ray Bradbury's death - note that he wrote his "only true science fiction" work at the UCLA library's typewriter.