OA monographs in the humanities from new European consortium

December 10, 2007 at 11:36 am | In E-Books, Open Access, Print on Demand (PoD) | Comments Off

Open Access Publishing in European Networks

OAPEN is a project in Open Access publishing for humanities monographs. The Open Access movement has developed rapidly in the sciences and in journal publishing. The consortium of University-based academic publishers who make up OAPEN believe that the time is ripe to fully explore the possibilities of Open Access in the humanities and social sciences.The OAPEN partners all currently have some involvement in the Open Access movement, and you are encouraged to view their pages on this site and on their own sites….

The partners (to date) are:

(Via Open Access News.)

University press issues OA editions of its OP books

October 30, 2007 at 5:37 pm | In E-Books, Electronic Publishing, Monographs, Open Access | Leave a Comment

Peter Suber comments thus on ULB’s decision to issue OA editions of its OP books:

 This is an excellent idea. Instead of letting OP books disappear from view, the original publishers should issue OA editions.  One day presses will routinely publish monographs in dual OA/TA editions, and use the OA editions to increase the visibility and sales of the TA editions.

(Via Open Access News.)

AHRC announces its OA policy

September 6, 2007 at 2:59 pm | In Uncategorized | Comments Off

The long-awaited new AHRC guidelines are now published at :

http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/about/policy/ahrc_guidance_on_access_to_research_outputs.asp

Here’s the relevant section on self-archiving:

Self-archiving – added to Terms and Conditions of Award

The AHRC requires that funded researchers:

ensure deposit of a copy of any resultant articles published in journals or conference proceedings in appropriate repository
wherever possible, ensure deposit of the bibliographical metadata relating to such articles, including a link to the publisher’s website, at or around the time of publication
Full implementation of these requirements must be undertaken such that current copyright and licensing policies, for example, embargo periods and provisions limiting the use of deposited content to non-commercial purposes, are respected by authors.

So … deposit of the full text is now mandated, but without a time limit. This puts no pressure on publishers to relax embargos.

Peter Suber’s response to PRISM’s press release

August 24, 2007 at 8:31 am | In Uncategorized | Comments Off

Peter Suber, Open Access News: A superb riposte to the press release issued by the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine

“The free market of scholarly publishing is responsive to the needs of scholars and scientists and balances the interests of all stakeholders.” Calling the current system a “free market” is also a distortion. (So is the claim that it balances the interests of all stakeholders, but I’ll leave that to one side here.) Most scientific research is funded by taxpayers. Most researcher salaries are paid by taxpayers. Most TA journal subscriptions are paid by taxpayers. And publishers receive both the articles and the referee reports as donations from authors and referees. Publishers don’t actually say that government money and policymaking should keep out of this sector, because that would really undermine their revenue. What they want is government intervention in all these areas except public access to publicly-funded research. What they want is the present arrangement of government subsidies for the work they publish, government subsidies for their own subscription fees, volunteer labor from authors and peer reviewers, double-payments from taxpayers who want access —and the label “free market” to wrap it all up in.

OA + POD for Cornell out-of-print and rare books

April 26, 2007 at 8:19 am | In Monographs, Open Access, Print on Demand (PoD) | Comments Off

Amazon.com-CU Library partnership

A selection of rare and out-of-print historical materials at Cornell University Library is only a click away for readers using a new print-on-demand service.

The library partnered with BookSurge, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, in June 2006 to make available some of its unique non-copyrighted holdings — collections ranging from historical mathematics and agriculture texts to anti-slavery pamphlets.

(Via Peter Suber.)

LJ Periodical Price Survey 2007

April 18, 2007 at 10:54 am | In Institutional Repositories, Journals Publishing, Open Access | Leave a Comment

Library Journal’s Periodical Price Survey 2007 is now available. Overall price rises for 2008 renewals are expected to be in the range of 7 to 9%. There is also an interesting analysis of the impact of Open Access and Institutional Repositories.

Subscription model faces threat from self-archiving

December 6, 2006 at 11:47 am | In Institutional Repositories, Journals Publishing, Open Access | Leave a Comment

Information World Review reports on a recent study conducted by the Publishing Research Consortium in which 400 librarians worldwide were surveyed:

Librarians are likely to cancel journal subscriptions in favour of free access to peer-reviewed research via open access repositories … The study found that librarians are sensitive to the embargo period: with a 24-month embargo, just over 50% prefer the paid-for version of a journal article.

Chris Beckett, director of Scholarly Information Strategies said: “The sooner publishers develop alternatives to enable OA, the better.”

Open Access books increasing sales of print editions

September 6, 2006 at 8:13 am | In E-Books, Electronic Publishing, Monographs, Open Access, Print on Demand (PoD) | Leave a Comment

An interesting report blogged by Peter Suber:

More evidence that OA books increase sales of print editions: David Glenn, Yale U. Press Places Book Online in Hopes of Increasing Print Sales, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 8, 2006 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:

[Jack M. Balkin's] Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology (Yale University Press, 1998)…was widely discussed in the late 1990s, but the book is now eight years old, and its sales have dwindled. So Mr. Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School, has concocted a new strategy for promulgating the spread of his own memes: He has persuaded the Yale press to release a free version of the book online. Anyone with Internet access can visit his Web site and download a high-resolution (but nonsearchable) PDF file of each chapter.

The idea, says the author, is that a small portion of the readers who sample Cultural Software online will decide to buy a printed copy of the book, producing a net increase in revenue for the press. (The online version has been issued under a license developed by Creative Commons….)

‘If this experiment succeeds,’ Mr. Balkin says, ‘it may change the way that university presses make money off their backlists. … What we are doing with Cultural Software may be a new and inexpensive way to create interest in the ‘long tail’ of scholarly works that sell only a few copies a year and would otherwise be a drag on profits.’

The director of the press, John E. Donatich, says Mr. Balkin’s experiment is one of several new explorations of electronic publishing there. Yale is among the six presses participating in the Caravan Project, a new program financed by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation that will allow publishers to release books simultaneously in print-on-demand cloth, paperback, digital, and audio formats…..

The Balkin project follows on the heels of Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, which Yale published in May. Mr. Benkler, who also teaches at Yale Law School, released his book in a free online format together with wiki pages that allow readers to criticize and annotate his text. Mr. Donatich says he is confident that Mr. Benkler’s online playground has not cannibalized sales of the printed book. On the contrary, the press director reports….

Those instances are hardly the first in which readers have been encouraged to browse books online in the hope that they will buy printed copies. Most university publishers participate in the licensed browsing programs operated by Amazon and Google that allow readers to look at a finite number of pages. More ambitiously, the National Academies Press and the Brookings Institution Press have released free texts of many of their books online, often in an unusual format that lets the reader view the books page by page but does not permit the wholesale downloading or printing of chapters.

‘Our experience indicates that for many titles, free online access acts as a driver for increased sales,’ writes Michael Jon Jensen, director of Web communications for the National Academies, in an e-mail message to The Chronicle. ‘We still are seeing increased online sales and stable overall print sales.’…

‘The real question,’ Mr. Balkin says, ‘is what the vocation of academic publishing is. Academic publishers saw themselves as trying to spread knowledge’— high-quality knowledge’— as far and wide as they could … not just as a service that they provide to the universities that they’re associated with. Well, now they can promote that vocation even better than they could before. And they may even be able to make money off of it, which would be all to the good.’

(Via Open Access News.)

The end of the print format for scholarly literature is in sight

August 31, 2006 at 10:18 am | In Electronic Publishing, Journals Publishing | Leave a Comment

According to ALPSP’s whitepaper entitled How Is Scholarly Communication Changing as a Result of the Web? (Brighton: ALPSP, 2006):

Institutions will drop print as the format
they acquire within the next 5 years.
Publishers need to be prepared for this with
a thorough and detailed understanding of
their print-specific, online-specific and
shared print- and online-related costs and
revenues.

My recollections of predictions of the demise of print go back more than ten years. The infrastructure for provision and preservation of online literature is, of course, much stronger now, but I wonder if all institutions are really ready to break with their ingrained collection-development habits.

Rice University new digital university press

July 17, 2006 at 11:17 am | In Creative Commons, E-Books, Electronic Publishing, Monographs, Open Access, Print on Demand (PoD) | Leave a Comment

Rice University has announced an interesting scheme to publish books online open-access and print-on-demand:

As money-strapped university presses shut down nationwide, Rice University is turning to technology to bring its press back to life as the first fully digital university press in the United States.
Using the open-source e-publishing platform Connexions, Rice University Press is returning from a decade-long hiatus to explore models of peer-reviewed scholarship for the 21st century. The technology offers authors a way to use multimedia — audio files, live hyperlinks or moving images — to craft dynamic scholarly arguments, and to publish on-demand original works in fields of study that are increasingly constrained by print publishing….

Charles Henry, Rice University vice provost, university librarian and publisher of Rice University Press during the startup phase, said, ‘Our decision to revive Rice’s press as a digital enterprise is based on both economics and on new ways of thinking about scholarly publishing. On the one hand, university presses are losing money at unprecedented rates, and technology offers us ways to decrease production costs and provide nearly ubiquitous delivery system, the Internet. We avoid costs associated with backlogs, large inventories and unsold physical volumes, and we greatly speed the editorial process. ‘We don’t have a precise figure for our startup costs yet, but it’s safe to say our startup costs and annual operating expenses will be at least 10 times less than what we’d expect to pay if we were using a traditional publishing model,’ Henry said….

Users will be able to view the content online for free or purchase a copy of the book for download through the Rice University Press Web site. Alternatively, thanks to Connexions’ partnership with on-demand printer QOOP, users will be able to order printed books if they want, in every style from softbound black-and-white on inexpensive paper to leather-bound full-color hardbacks on high-gloss paper. ‘As with a traditional press, our publications will be peer-reviewed, professionally vetted and very high quality,’ Henry said. ‘But the choice to have a printed copy will be up to the customer.’…

Authors published by Rice University Press will retain the copyrights for their works, in accordance with Connexions’ licensing agreement with Creative Commons.”

(Via Peter Suber, Open Access News.)

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