PaperC is a new platform for OA books. (Thanks to Blick Log.)
At the moment Paper C is in beta and limited to invited users.
According to Andreas Menn's article in Saturday's Handelsblatt (also see Google's English), reading a PaperC book online is free of charge, and users only have to pay if they want to print excerpts or annotate pages. PaperC is currently running a trial with 1,500 German students and 3,000 German books in computer science, economics, law, and medicine.
Apparently the company will not publish its own books but merely host books from cooperating publishers. Olaf Ernst, President of E-Product Management & Innovation at Springer, said that PaperC was a promising model.
Comment. This is essentially the business model of ebrary at the time of its launch, circa 2002. Sometime after 2005 ebrary changed its model, and now allows the original content publishers to choose their own business models. (None of the suggested models includes OA.) Does anyone know why ebrary changed? The reasons may affect the prospects of PaperC.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/08/2009 12:31:00 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.
