Category: Scholarly Books

"What Future for Digital Scholarly Editions? From Haute Couture to Prêt-à-Porter"

Elena Pierazzo has published "What Future for Digital Scholarly Editions? From Haute Couture to Prêt-à-Porter" in the International Journal of Digital Humanities.

Here's an excerpt:

Digital scholarly editions are expensive to make and to maintain. As such, they prove unattainable for less established scholars like early careers and PhD students, or indeed anyone without access to significant funding. One solution could be to create tools and platforms able to provide a publishing framework for digital scholarly editions that requires neither a high-tech skillset nor big investment.

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"Springer Nature Publishes Its First Machine-Generated Book"

Springer Nature has released "Springer Nature Publishes Its First Machine-Generated Book."

Here's an excerpt:

Springer Nature published its first machine-generated book in chemistry. The book prototype provides an overview of the latest research in the rapidly growing field of lithium-ion batteries. . . .

In close collaboration between Springer Nature and researchers from Goethe University Frankfurt/Main, a state-of-the-art algorithm, the so-called Beta Writer, was developed to select, consume and process relevant publications in this field from Springer Nature’s content platform SpringerLink. Based on this peer-reviewed and published content, the Beta Writer uses a similarity-based clustering routine to arrange the source documents into coherent chapters and sections. It then creates succinct summaries of the articles. The extracted quotes are referenced by hyperlinks which allow readers to further explore the original source documents. Automatically created introductions, table of contents and references facilitate the orientation within the book.

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"Open Access and the Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual"

Jill Cirasella and Polly Thistlethwaite have self-archived "Open Access and the Graduate Author: A Dissertation Anxiety Manual. "

Here's an excerpt:

Now that dissertations are deposited and distributed electronically, students must perform yet another anxiety-inducing task: deciding whether they want to make their dissertations immediately open access (OA) or, at universities that require OA, coming to terms with openness. For some students, mostly in the humanities and some of the social sciences, who hope to transform their dissertations into books, OA has become a bogeyman, a supposed saboteur of book contracts and destroyer of careers.

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Future of Scholarly Publishing and Scholarly Communication: Report of the Expert Group to the European Commission

Jean-Claude Guédon et al. have self-archived Future of Scholarly Publishing and Scholarly Communication: Report of the Expert Group to the European Commission.

Here's an excerpt:

This report analyses the recent past and present states of scholarly communication and publishing. It proposes ten principles through which a vision for scholarly communication is shaped over the next 10-15 years. These principles also serve as a way to examine shortcomings of the current scholarly communication and publishing system. The report then offers recommendations to key actors in the scholarly communication system about the best ways to address these shortcomings. The discussion in the report focuses mainly on journals and articles, although books and monographs are also considered, as well as the significance of new and emerging forms of scholarly communication.

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"OER Cost Assessment Strategies"

Nichole Karpel and Bruce Schneider have published "OER Cost Assessment Strategies" in EDUCAUSE Review.

Here's an excerpt:

Open educational resources can provide access to high-quality resources while offsetting the costs of traditional textbooks. An array of costs are associated with the "free" approach, however, and institutions that are successful with OER understand that moving to open resources requires extensive planning, selection, management, and maintenance.

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"New Advances in Open Source Infrastructure Support: Accelerated Book Digitization with Editoria"

Clare Dean has published "New Advances in Open Source Infrastructure Support: Accelerated Book Digitization with Editoria" in Insights.

Here's an excerpt:

How can open source infrastructure support a modernized, accelerated book production workflow? The California Digital Library, the University of California Press and the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation collaborated to design a new platform—Editoria—to do exactly this, following a new user-driven design method to result in a simple, people-centric interface. This case study details the main problem facing publishers who are restrained by outdated, print-oriented production platforms, the 'reimagining' exercise and the iterative design process that has resulted in new technology which can be adopted, adapted and integrated by publishers.

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"BISG Releases Draft White Paper on Open Access Ebook Usage"

The Book Industry Study Group has released Building a Trusted Framework for Coordinating OA Monograph Usage Data.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This funded project is designed to identify the challenges in understanding the usage of OA ebooks, suggest some opportunities for resolving them, and create a framework for future action through community consultation. It focuses on the challenges of identifying and aggregating relevant information from different platforms, analyzing what has been gathered in ways that respect user privacy, and communicating relevant information about usage to stakeholders.

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"The Rights Provisions of a Book Publishing Contract"

Melody Herr has published "The Rights Provisions of a Book Publishing Contract" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

When signing a publishing contract, an author makes decisions which directly affect the book's availability. In order to decide judiciously which rights to retain and which to transfer to a publisher, she needs an understanding of U.S. copyright law and the author-publisher partnership. In this article, Melody Herr, PhD, a scholarly communications professional who has over 16 years of experience in academic publishing and who has authored six books herself, explains the rights provisions of a book contract. First, she discusses copyright ownership and describes the ways in which copyright's components apply to scholarly books. After enumerating the benefits and drawbacks of allocating specific rights to a publisher, she highlights contract wording to watch for and suggests the rights an author may wish to retain by negotiating an addendum. She then explains how an author may reclaim rights granted to a publisher through reversion or termination of transfer. In the conclusion, she recommends that outreach programs target scholars at critical moments when they face decisions regarding publication of their work.

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"Format Shift: Information Behavior and User Experience in the Academic E-book Environment"

Daniel G. Tracy has published "Format Shift: Information Behavior and User Experience in the Academic E-book Environment" in Reference & User Services Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

This article seeks to understand information behavior in the context of the academic e-book user experience, shaped by a disparate set of vendor platforms licensed by libraries. These platforms vary in design and affordances, yet studies of e-book use in an academic context often treat e-books as a unified phenomenon in opposition to print books. Based on participant diaries tracking e-book information behavior and follow-up interviews and focus groups on troubleshooting and format shifting behaviors, this study seeks to provide a deep qualitative look at decisions that academic users make about formats when encountering e-books.

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"Measuring Open Access Policy Compliance: Results of a Survey"

Shannon Kipphut-Smith et al. have published "Measuring Open Access Policy Compliance: Results of a Survey" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

INTRODUCTION In the last decade, a significant number of institutions have adopted open access (OA) policies. Many of those working with OA policies are tasked with measuring policy compliance. This article reports on a survey of Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI) members designed to better understand the methods currently used for measuring and communicating OA policy success. METHODS This electronic survey was distributed to the COAPI member listserv, inviting both institutions who have passed an implemented policies and those who are still developing policies to participate. RESULTS The results to a number of questions related to topics such as policy workflows, quantitative and qualitative measurement activities and related tools, and challenges showed a wide range of responses, which are shared here. DISCUSSION It is clear that a number of COAPI members struggle with identifying what should be measured and what tools and methods are appropriate. The survey illustrates how each institution measures compliance differently, making it difficult to benchmark against peer institutions. CONCLUSION As a result of this survey, we recommend that institutions working with OA policies be as transparent as possible about their data sources and methods when calculating deposit rates and other quantitative measures. It is hoped that this transparency will result in the development of a set of qualitative and quantitative best practices for assessing OA policies that standardizes assessment terminology and articulates why institutions may want to measure policies.

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"Monographs on the Move?: A View on ‘Decoupling’ and Other Prospects"

Andrew Lockett has published "Monographs on the Move?: A View on 'Decoupling' and Other Prospects" in Insights.

Here's an excerpt:

In the context of the recent debate about the movement towards a monographs mandate for the UK, this opinion piece considers the logic of ‘decoupling’ that underlies it. It also looks at the real opportunities to improve on the current extraordinarily durable high-price system for publishing long-form research. Thinking around decoupled monograph publishing has positioned academic authors as the individual consumers of diverse publishing services (a wide array of which are fast emerging) in the face of significant scholarly caution. Furthermore, a danger of renewed market dominance by price-makers in an open access environment remains, with the risk of inequitable outcomes that may mirror problems that have arisen in journals. Opportunities may also arise for new local initiatives, especially collective and community-based publishing, with academic libraries likely to be in the middle of a fast-changing and contested environment for publishing monographs.

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