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.
The Library Publishing Coalition has released digital video recordings from the 2015 Conference: Creating and Supporting Sustainable Publishing Programs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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."
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.
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"
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"
Here's a brief case study of how one book under a Creative Commons license evolved and was accessed.
In 2005, the Association of Research Libraries published my book, the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License. With ARL's agreement, I made an open access PDF available on Digital Scholarship.
In 2006, I converted the book into an open access XHTML website and published the Open Access Bibliography Author Index and the Open Access Bibliography Title Index.
In 2008, I worked with Open Access Directory staff to convert it to wiki format and publish it as the basis for the Bibliography of Open Access.
In 2010, I published Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography as an open access PDF file, an open access XHTML website, and a low-cost paperback. All versions of the bibliography were under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License. This derivative work was an updated version of the Open Access Bibliography that was more narrowly focused on scholarly treatments of open access.
Below are the Digital Scholarship use statistics for the two books as of October 31, 2014. In this analysis, only HTML files or PDF files are counted as "page views"; image files and other supporting website files are excluded. This analysis also excludes spider use.
That's a total of over 507,000 page views. For the measured time period, about 7.9% of all file requests to Digital Scholarship failed. Consequently, I'll eliminate 7.9% of the above page views and estimate that there were over 466,000 successful page views. This tally does not include any access statistics from ARL or the OAD (nor does it include paperback sales).
If the multi-file HTML versions of the books are eliminated from consideration, the two books still had a total of over 173,000 PDF requests (excluding spider requests), adjusted to an estimated 159,000 plus successful PDF requests.
To put these use statistics in perspective, in 2005, Willis Regier (Director of the University of Illinois Press) estimated that the typical university press book sold between 400 to 800 copies.
Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"
Ithaka S+R has released Faster and Cheaper: Can a Digital-Centric Workflow Transform the Book Review?.
Here's an excerpt:
In July 2014, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) received funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Digital Information Technology Program to help underwrite the development of a new digital prototype for book reviews. This prototype will be a website that supports a digital workflow from the publisher's electronic files all the way through to online publication of the review.
Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"
The International Publishers Association has released Innovation in E-book Lending.
Here's an excerpt:
This special report assesses recent developments in e-lending, both in the trade and the academic sector, studying innovative approaches from the US, France, Sweden and Brazil. What these different projects have in common is that they are based on licenses which provide libraries with the conditions to acquire and lending e-books while putting publishers in control of lending terms. This allows publishers not just to protect their revenue streams, but to expand them.
Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"
The Digital Preservation Coalition has released Preserving eBooks.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
Written by Portico's Amy Kirchhoff and Sheila Morrissey, and published in association with Charles Beagrie Ltd., this report discusses the current developments and issues with which public, national and higher education libraries, publishers, aggregators and preservation institutions must contend to ensure long-term access to eBook content.
Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"
Boston Library Consortium has released "Ebook Pricing Hikes Amount to Price-Gouging" as a letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Here's an excerpt:
Consequently, the BLC will lower the price ceiling below which individual titles are eligible to be included in our ebook program, we will reduce the availability of back-list titles at high price points, and we will increase the portion of our consortial budget that is allocated to those publishers whose pricing remains reasonable. In this way, we mean to reward what we regard as fair dealing, as we attempt to limit the budget impact of what appears plainly to be price-gouging.
Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap
De Gruyter has released its frontlist titles in the ePub3 format.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
The ePub format supports variable font sizes as well as the dynamic adjustment of content to the device's screen size. EBooks in the ePub format are released as a single file, as opposed to the one-file-per-chapter format of PDF-based eBooks. De Gruyter is one of the first academic presses worldwide to offer customers the choice between the ePub and PDF formats when purchasing an eBook.
Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap
Patrick H. Alexander has published "Teaching an Old University Press Publisher New Tricks: Living in the Present and Preparing for the Future of Scholarly Communications" in the Journal of Electronic Publishing.
Here's an excerpt:
University presses currently exist in the dual worlds of print and digital publishing. Current staffing needs require that they hire personnel with skills and experience that mirror that present duality. Training and maintaining a skilled workforce requires a commitment to flexibility and an openness to the ever-changing nature of scholarly communication. As the scholarly publishing ecosystem continues to evolve, university presses will need to look to a future workforce that has additional training, knowledge, and experience beyond the traditional skills associated with academic publishing, one that fully embraces the realities of a digital world, the habits of new generations of researchers, and the increasing role of technology in scholarly communication. This article looks at what the future might look like, what skills might be required, and how one might prepare for that future.
Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap
Mercedes Bunz has published "'The Returned': on the Future of Monographic Books" in Insights: The UKSG journal.
Here's an excerpt:
This article evaluates the current state of academic book publishing based on the findings of the Hybrid Publishing Lab's business model research. With students relying more and more on Google and Wikipedia, the role of books within today's university studies is a difficult one. From the perspective of publishers, open access (OA) embracing the digital is seen as one potential way to bridge this gap between online search engines and traditional monographs. To illustrate this further, the article delivers an overview of its findings, which highlight changes in academic publishing: publishers have switched their emphasis from delivering a product to creating a service, whereby the author rather than the reader becomes their most focused-on customer. Research frameworks, funding and conventions about academic careers, however, often still need to adjust to this new development. If these frameworks acknowledge and foster OA publishing, and new experiments with collaborative book productions flourish, the monograph will have a future.
Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap
Eelco Ferwerda has published "Open Access Monograph Business Models" in Insights: The UKSG journal.
Here's an excerpt:
In recent years, a number of business models have been developed for open access (OA) monographs in the humanities and social sciences (HSS). While each model has been created in response to specific circumstances and needs, some commonalities can be observed. This article outlines some of the main types of model to support the costs of publishing OA books and provides examples of these models across the world.
It is followed by three short sketches providing more depth on: firstly, a traditional publisher's OA monograph offer; secondly, a licensing-based model which draws from existing library budgets; and finally, an experiment with delayed open access for books in philosophy: http://dx.doi.org/10.1629/2048-7754.118.
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Julie Waters et al. have published "A Comparison of E-book and Print Book Discovery, Preferences, and Usage by Science and Engineering Faculty and Graduate Students at the University of Kansas" in Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship.
Here's an excerpt:
The availability of science and technology e-books through the University of Kansas Libraries is growing rapidly through approval plans, e-book packages, and electronic demand-driven acquisitions. Based on informal conversations with faculty, questions still lingered as to the acceptance of books in the electronic format by faculty and graduate students in the STEM disciplines. To learn more about book format preferences, a survey was distributed via e-mail to 1,898 faculty and graduate students in science and technology at the University of Kansas. The survey included questions focused on print book use, e-book use, format preferences, and demographics. A majority of the 357 respondents indicated a preference for print books indicating many of the oft-repeated comments about the disadvantages of reading books on a computer. Patrons using tablets were more inclined to access e-books. The survey indicated a continuing need to purchase books in both print and electronic formats, and to market the availability of e-books to University of Kansas patrons.
Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap
Audrey Powers has self-archived "E-Book Platforms for Academic Librarians."
Here's an excerpt:
The goal of this issue is to provide a succinct overview of e-book platforms for academic librarians as well as insights into where e-book platforms are headed in the future. Most of the authors work in academic libraries and their job responsibilities include developing, procuring, promoting, and educating users about e-books. The topics covered include an overview of e-book platforms including technical aspects and business models, lending platforms, aggregator platforms, commercial publisher platforms, and university press platforms. It is our hope that when you read these articles it will add to your knowledge base about the current and future state of e-book platforms in academic libraries.
Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Sitemap
