The Ithaka folks put out a really sharp report on the state of university presses and libraries vis-a-vis scholarly publishing last week. This is excellent stuff; I highly recommend it. A few random thoughts on it....
The hits at institutional repositories are so good I’m going to quote them in [a forthcoming] article. Yes, we are dusty university attics. No, I don’t like it either. However… we’re not as well-funded as the uni presses think we are. Nor I don’t understand why some of these folks aren’t working with us, neither. Heaven forbid we should solve some of their preservation problems or give their backlist new distribution channels or rescue their out-of-print works or anything. But siloing and Not Invented Here is the heart of the difficulty, isn’t it? ...
I don’t mind the print-on-demand-for-pay models so much, but I do think trying to make direct money off e-publishing, especially of low-demand monographs, is a pipe dream. Bite the bullet and go open-access. The argument you then take to university brass is a cost-containment one: “This stuff needs to get published. It can get published at zero marginal cost and at the same time take advantage of greater reach from data-mining and web crawling, or it can get published in print at huge marginal cost and languish in warehouses because libraries can’t afford to buy it, or it can get published online with totally unnecessary (and possibly not recoupable) marginal costs of building and maintaining secure datacenters and fulfillment operations, or it can not get published at all and torpedo careers. You tell me what makes the most sense.” ...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/31/2007 09:56:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
