Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Tuesday, October 14, 2008

New OA book on digital libraries

Wendy Pradt Lougee and Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason, eds., Economics and Usage of Digital Libraries: Byting the Bullet, University of Michigan Library Scholarly Publishing Office, 2008. See the announcement dated October 12, 2008:
... In the late 1990's, researchers and digital library production staff at the University of Michigan collaborated on deploying the Pricing Economic Access to Knowledge project (PEAK), a full-scale production-quality digital access system to enable usage of content from all of Elsevier's (then about 1200) scholarly journals, and at the same time to conduct a field experiment to answer various questions about the interplay between pricing models and usage. The experiment culminated in a lively conference that engaged scholars, library practioners and publishers. This volume captures some of the most interesting and provocative discussions to come out of that conference. PEAK was a ground-breaking effort in its day, and references to the project have continued over time. It raised important questions about the potential for highly functional journal content and new economic models of publishing. In today’s context of socially-enabled systems and open-access publishing, the motivating questions of PEAK remain relevant. ...