Category: Scholarly Books

"Assessing the User Experience of E-Books in Academic Libraries"

College & Research Libraries has released an e-print of "Assessing the User Experience of E-Books in Academic Libraries" by Tao Zhang, Xi Niu and Marlen Proman.

Here's an excerpt:

We report findings from an assessment of e-book user experience (search and information seeking) from usage data and user tests. The usage data showed that most reading sessions were brief and focused on certain pages, suggesting that users mainly use e-books to find specific information. The user tests found that participants tended to use default keyword search and browse the search results. Experience levels with e-books and features of e-book platforms influenced users' information seeking in e-books. The assessment results have significant implications for designing e-book features to support users' reading strategies and help libraries create a consistent user experience.

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"Wiley Reports Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2015 Results"

John Wiley & Sons has released "Wiley Reports Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2015 Results."

Here's an excerpt:

Revenue: Fourth quarter revenue on a constant currency basis declined 1% to $275 million, with a decline in journal subscription (-2%) and print book (-8%) revenue offsetting growth in other journal revenue (+6%), digital books (+3%), and funded access (+3%). For the year, revenue on a constant currency basis rose 2% to $1,041 million, driven by journal subscriptions (+1%), funded access (+29%), and other journal revenue (+15%), which offset an overall book decline of 7%.

See also: "Wiley Touts Digital Progress in Down Fiscal 2016."

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"Demographics of Scholarly Publishing and Communication Professionals"

Albert N. Greco, Robert M. Wharton, and Amy Brand have published the "Demographics of Scholarly Publishing and Communication Professionals" in Learned Publishing.

Here's an excerpt:

While a great deal is known about the companies active in this sector, we need to know more about the employees of the firms that edit, produce, market, and distribute today's scholarly books and journals. To achieve this goal, the researchers conducted an international survey in late 2014 and early 2015 of approximately 6,121 scholarly publishing employees in 33 nations.

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"Dramatic Growth of Open Access March 31, 2016"

Heather Morrison has published "Dramatic Growth of Open Access March 31, 2016 " in The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics.

Here's an excerpt:

There are now 150 publishers of peer-reviewed open access books listed in the Directory of Open Access Books, publishing more than 4,400 open access books. 620 books were published in this quarter alone, a 16% increase in just this quarter. The Directory of Open Access Journals has been adding titles at a net rate of 6 titles per day, 540 journals added this quarter for a total of over 11,000 journals.

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"Making OA Monographs Happen: Library-Press Collaboration at the University of Ottawa, Canada"

Tony Horava has published "Making OA Monographs Happen: Library-Press Collaboration at the University of Ottawa, Canada" in Insights: The UKSG Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

At the University of Ottawa, Canada, the UO Press and the UO Library have developed a strategic partnership to publish and disseminate selected new monographs as gold open access (OA). Starting in 2013, the Library agreed to fund three books at C$10,000 per book (a total of C$30,000 per year) in order to remove barriers to accessing scholarship and to align with scholarly communication goals of the University. In 2015 this agreement was renewed for another three years and the funding was increased to cover four books (a total of C$40,000 per year). Ten titles have so far been published under this model. The data reveals that there have been 12,629 downloads as well as 16,584 page views of these titles, as of September 2015. There have been over 4,700 copies (print and EPUB) sold in spite of the free availability of the PDF version.

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The Costs of Publishing Monographs: Toward a Transparent Methodology

Ithaka S+R has released The Costs of Publishing Monographs: Toward a Transparent Methodology .

Here's an excerpt:

While there have been numerous efforts to understand the costs of publishing a scholarly monograph, this study is unique in that we worked with an advisory group of university press publishers to identify all of the cost components in scholarly monographic publishing and to work with a wide variety of university presses to calculate their costs of each of those components in a bottom-up fashion.

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"Library Publishing and Diversity Values: Changing Scholarly Publishing through Policy and Scholarly Communication Education"

Charlotte Roh has published "Library Publishing and Diversity Values: Changing Scholarly Publishing through Policy and Scholarly Communication Education" in College & Research Libraries News.

Here's an excerpt:

What are the consequences of this lack of diversity in publishing, librarianship, and faculty? We know already that privilege can bias access to material, which is part of why the open access movement exists, to alleviate the barriers that cost can create for researchers. However, one possible consequence is a feedback loop in scholarship that privileges and publishes the majority voice, which is often white and male.

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OAPEN-UK Final Report: A Five-Year Study into Open Access Monograph Publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences

OAPEN-UK has released OAPEN-UK Final Report: A Five-Year Study into Open Access Monograph Publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Examining the attitudes and perceptions of funders, researchers, publishers, learned societies, universities and libraries, our study reiterated the deep strength of feeling and connectedness that each group has with the monograph, especially in terms of identity and reputation. It also found that while many think open access is a good idea in principle, there is uncertainty about how easy it would be to implement the necessary policies and systems to support OA monographs.

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The Future of the Monograph in the Digital Era: A Report to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Michael Elliott has self-archived The Future of the Monograph in the Digital Era: A Report to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Here's an excerpt:

Over the course of six months, our working group endeavored to consider whether a model of university-funded monograph publication could improve the publishing landscape for scholars in the humanities and facilitate the "digital transition" that Berkery foresees. Under such a model, a university would bear a high percentage of the publication costs through an initial contract. The university press would produce a high quality, open-access digital publication, as well as make the book available in print form—possibly through print-on-demand.

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Research Library Issues, no. 287

ARL has released Research Library Issues, no. 287.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

ARL has published Research Library Issues (RLI) no. 287, an issue in which Rikk Mulligan offers an overview of the history of scholarly communication from its beginnings in the 17th century to recent innovations in digital and hybrid publishing.

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The Once and Future Publishing Library

The Council on Library and Information Resources has released The Once and Future Publishing Library .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The report explores the revitalization of library publishing and its possible future, and examines elements that influence the success and sustainability of library publishing initiatives.

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"The Impact of Open Access on Collection Management"

Adelia Grabowsky has published "The Impact of Open Access on Collection Management" in Virginia Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

This article examines if and how the integration of OA materials has changed collection and/or access management activities within academic libraries.

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University of Minnesota Press and GC Digital Scholarship Lab Get $732,000 Mellon Grant for Manifold Scholarship

The University of Minnesota Press and GC Digital Scholarship Lab of Graduate Center of the City University of New York have received a $732,000 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant for Manifold Scholarship.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Moving beyond the digitization of scholarly books, based primarily in siloed, read-only analogues to print such as Adobe Acrobat PDF and Epub, Manifold will define and create the next phase of scholarly publishing: monographs that open the boundaries of separate formats like "print" and "e-book." Foreseeing an emerging hybrid environment for scholarship, Manifold will develop, alongside the print edition of a book, an alternate form of publication that is networked and iterative, served on an interactive, open-source platform. . . .

In Manifold, a digital scholarly work would not be a static replication of the print book. From the beginning it is dynamic, revised, and expanded to reflect the evolution of academic thought and research, incorporating access to primary research documents and data, links to related archives, rich media, social media, and reading tools. Manifold seeks to encompass the growth and refinement of academic work as it is discussed, reviewed, and analyzed.

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Understanding Rights Reversion: When, Why, & How to Regain Copyright and Make Your Book More Available

The Authors Alliance has released Understanding Rights Reversion: When, Why, & How to Regain Copyright and Make Your Book More Available.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This guide is the product of extensive outreach to the publishing industry. In the process, we interviewed authors, publishers, and literary agents, ranging from a CEO of a major publishing house to contracts and rights managers of trade and academic presses, editorial assistants, novelists, and academic authors.

We were happily surprised by the consistency of publishers' responses: across the board, publishers told us that they want to work together with their authors and that they are often willing to give authors their rights back if its in the books' best interests.

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"5 Million Public Domain Ebooks in HathiTrust: What Does This Mean?"

Rick Anderson has published "5 Million Public Domain Ebooks in HathiTrust: What Does This Mean?" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

A week or so ago, a monumental thing happened: the number of public-domain books in the HathiTrust digital repository topped 5 million. And since no one (including HathiTrust, so far) seems to be making a very big deal about this, it seems like a good moment both to recap the achievements of HathiTrust and to consider a few of its implications for the future of reading and scholarship.

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"What We Got Wrong about Books"

Joseph Esposito has published "What We Got Wrong about Books" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

This is where we have gotten into trouble. The apparent fixity of a book, the tendency to think of a book as something stuck inside an inflexible container, has led us to imagine that books are used the way they are written, or how we assume they are written—that is, from beginning to end. The prominence of the novel as a literary form over the past two centuries reinforces this. Who would want to break off in the middle of Tom Jones? The traditional novel is linear, which has created an expectation that all books are linear. That expectation is simply wrong, as Kobo and our own reading experience tell us.

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"Better Sharing Through Licenses? Measuring the Influence of Creative Commons Licenses on the Usage of Open Access Monographs"

Ronald Snijder has published "Better Sharing Through Licenses? Measuring the Influence of Creative Commons Licenses on the Usage of Open Access Monographs" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

The application of open licenses to books does not, on its own, lead to more downloads. However, open licenses pave the way for intermediaries to offer new discovery and aggregation services. These services play an important role by amplifying the impacts of open access licensing in the case of scholarly books.

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"The OA Interviews: Alison Mudditt, Director, University of California Press"

Richard Poynder has published "The OA Interviews: Alison Mudditt, Director, University of California Press" in Open and Shut? in which Mudditt discusses the UC Press' Collabra and Luminos open access programs.

Here's an excerpt:

Collabra's model speaks to publishers, libraries, funders, and researchers who are seeking more cost transparency and greater recognition of the critical role that the academic and scientific community plays in journal publishing. In our model, the people who do the fundamental work of peer-review are recognized for this and are able to decide where to place that value.

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UC Press and the CDL Given a $750,000 Mellon Grant to Develop OA Monograph Publication System

The University of California Press and the California Digital Library have been given a $750,000 grant by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation "to develop a web-based, open source content and workflow management system to support the publication of open access (OA) monographs in the humanities and social sciences."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The proposed system will increase efficiency and achieve cost reduction by allowing users to manage content and associated workflows from initial authoring through manuscript submission, peer review, and production to final publication of files on the open web, whether via a publishing platform or an institutional repository. The system will streamline production so publishers can redirect resources back into the editorial process and disseminate important scholarship more widely.

During this two-year period, the system will be designed and built to support the new open access models being pursued by UC Press as well as CDL's current publishing programs. Throughout the two-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, UC Press and CDL will engage other university presses and library publishing units to ensure the system will meet the needs of a range of organizations. UC Press and CDL have built in a plan for long-term sustainability to ensure that this resource will continue to serve these communities and will realize its potential to re-invigorate the domain of monographic publishing within the humanities and social sciences.

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"The Case of the Disappearing E-book: Academic Libraries and Subscription Packages"

College & Research Libraries has released "The Case of the Disappearing E-Book: Academic Libraries and Subscription Packages" by Helen Georgas.

Here's an excerpt:

This study begins with a one-year analysis of "disappeared" titles from ebrary's Academic Complete™ collection at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York (CUNY). Were certain subject areas particularly affected? Which publishers were removed? Were the removed titles mainly scholarly, or were they titles published by popular presses? Were the removed monographs older publications, or were recent titles deleted as well?

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JEP Publishes Books in Browsers V Proceedings

The Journal of Electronic Publishing has released its latest issue, which presents the Books in Browsers V proceedings. The articles are primarily in video format

Here's an excerpt from "Editor's Note [18.1]":

While there are a few changes, what remains is the mission of the conference and the consistently high quality of its programming. As Peter Brantley, the driving force behind Books in Browsers, notes, the conference intends to and does "explore how rapidly evolving open web standards can support advanced digital publishing, and in turn how the frontiers of digital publishing design, supporting highly customized authorial intentions, push on our understanding of the nature and corpus of web standards."

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Monographs and Open Access: A Report to HEFCE

The HEFCE has released Monographs and Open Access: A Report to HEFCE.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

  • Monographs are a vitally important and distinctive vehicle for research communication, and must be sustained in any moves to open access. The availability of printed books alongside the open-access versions will be essential.
  • Contrary to many perceptions, it would not be appropriate to talk of a crisis of the monograph; this does not mean that monographs are not facing challenges, but the arguments for open access would appear to be for broader and more positive reasons than solving some supposed crisis.
  • Open access offers both short- and long-term advantages for monograph publication and use; many of these are bound up with a transition to digital publishing that has not been at the same speed as that for journals.
  • There is no single dominant emerging business model for supporting open-access publishing of monographs; a range of approaches will coexist for some time and it is unlikely that any single model will emerge as dominant. Policies will therefore need to be flexible.

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CNI Executive Roundtable Report: E-Book Strategies

CNI has released CNI Executive Roundtable Report: E-Book Strategies .

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

During two separate convenings of this roundtable, we explored questions that these new directions raise for institutions, the strategies that institutions are using to make choices among the available paths, the stakeholders involved, and the new programs and projects that CNI’s members are planning or have implemented. Our emphasis was on breadth rather than deep explorations of very specific issues; often we were most interested in understanding how institutions were shaping the questions and how they were exploring them, since many of these questions are far from resolution. Roundtable participants included representatives from academic libraries and information technology units from research institutions and liberal arts colleges, library associations, publishers, and aggregators/intermediaries.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"A Living Open Book"

Peter Suber has published "A Living Open Book" in Ebooks in Education: Realising The Vision.

Here's an excerpt:

This is a case study of my short book, Open Access (Suber 2012a). The book is not "enhanced" in the way that a growing number of digital academic books are enhanced. It has no graphics, no multimedia, and no interactivity beyond links, and does not offer different layers or pathways for readers at different levels. From that point of the view the book is conventional and text-oriented. But it has two other enhancements worth highlighting. First, the full text is open access, which benefits authors and readers, and sometimes also publishers. Second, the book has a companion web site of open-access updates and supplements, which benefits all three groups.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"