The tension between the digital world and the world of the printed book was highlighted during “Why Books Still Matter,” a one-day symposium on scholarly publishing held November 14 at Yale University. The conference was sponsored by Yale's Whitney Humanities Center, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and Yale University Press to mark the press's centennial....
Michael Heller, an expert on property theory at Columbia Law School, challenged the current publishing business model, emphasizing that all forms of culture today, from music to news, involve assembling information from various sources....Heller said...universities and their presses “shrink fair use, clamp down on copyright 'pirates,' monetize every shard of an idea. I'm all for the survival of university presses, but let's not fund them by crushing the leading edge of art and science.” ...
The final panel, “Whither the University Press,” featured four heads of presses—Donatich of Yale, Peter Dougherty of Princeton, Ellen Faran of MIT and William Sisler of Harvard—who dealt with the nuts and bolts of experiments in digital and open-access publishing and surveyed other ways of expanding their readership. Faran reported on MIT publishing books simultaneously in print and open-access formats. In areas of business and economics, she said, the model has worked. “What I mean by 'work,' ” she explained, “is that we sold 4,000 to 6,000 copies” of the print edition.”
Sisler reported that Harvard's press is working on an open-access journal with the law school and is seeking ways of collaborating with various arms of the university....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/25/2008 01:57:00 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.
