...Many university presses in recent years have moved into trade publications, aimed at widening their audience and increasing their revenue stream. University presses found themselves in a quandary. On the one hand, they had a foundation brief to publish original and often esoteric scholarship, but on the other, they needed to achieve financial viability. They were between an academic publishing rock and a financial hard place....
The 21st century may be one in which university press publishing goes "back to the future", in that institutions again assume responsibility for access to and distribution of institutional scholarship, scholarship that combines authority with public accessibility within digital frameworks....
California eScholarship is now one of the success stories in the distribution of institutional scholarship. This repository is part of the California Digital Library initiative. Research and scholarly output included is selected and deposited by the individual University of California units.
In one week late last month the website recorded 17,199 full-text downloads of repository content, while to date there have been a remarkable 6,587,012 full-text downloads....
The blunt fact is that the vast majority of students will never see their theses published in monographic form and they would be far better advised placing them in the various institutional and nationally linked digital theses programs....
The Australian National University and the University of Sydney have moved into the e press and eScholarship arenas, with electronic access being the main provision, supplemented by print copies through print-on-demand.
The aim of the E Press is to distribute ANU research globally....
ANU E Press complete pdf and html downloads from January to November 2007 totalled 1.16 million....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/09/2008 10:10:00 PM.
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.
