UC Davis Experiments with a New Textbook Model: An Interview with Jason Lorgan
An interview with Jason Lorgan, executive director of campus stores at @UCDavis, about the university’s innovative new textbook-affordability program.
Scholarly E-Books and University Presses – Part Two
The second of two posts on the roles of e-books in scholarly publishing, focused on how e-books fit into the mission and the business model of university presses and what that might mean for authors and readers.
A Case for Popularization: A Review of Rockonomics
Bringing the authority of the academy to a broad audience should be second only to original research itself, especially if the research community hopes to retain or even increase the public’s support for the esoteric work that goes on behind the laboratory walls.
The Joy of Search: A Review
Users need training in the complexities of online search. A new book by Daniel Russell from MIT Press offers solid instruction in how to think about the search process.
Will E-Books Feed University Presses — Or Eat Them? Part One
What roles are e-books now playing, and what roles will they play, in scholarly disciplines for which books are a primary, often the apex, scholarly form? The first of two posts about e-books and university presses.
Guest Post — Common Threads: Doing Things Differently So We Can Do Different Things
As the amount of scholarship continues to grow, Common Threads asks what new insights and utility can be found in reorganization of content for new audiences.
Guest Post: Plan S and Humanities Publishing
Jasmin Lange from Brill suggests a path forward for open access in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Open Access Monographs: Building Better Infrastructure
Experimentation is key in supporting open access monographs. We’ve done the research and now it’s time to build a better user experience.
Internal Contradictions with Open Access Books
Consolidation and concentration are inherent properties of media in a networked environment.
Where Does a University Press Sit in its Parent’s Priorities?
The unfortunate news about cutbacks at Stanford University Press makes it clear that all presses must develop strategies to make them more central to the university’s set of priorities.
Guest Post — The Dissertation Publication Requirement: It’s Time for Reexamination
Guest author Rob Schlesinger encourages a rethink of the common requirement that graduate students publish their dissertations.
Guest Post — Low Cost Textbook Alternatives: Worth the Effort?
When a University of Utah professor grew frustrated with the slim textbook offerings available to students of Arabic, she turned to the library for help. The result was the collaborative creation of a new and radically cheaper text — that got much higher ratings from students than the old one had. How did we do it?
Book Review: Academic Freedom, edited by Jennifer Lackey (Oxford University Press, 2018)
A review of Academic Freedom the latest book in Oxford University Press’s series Engaging Philosophy.
Extracting Book Data from Library Information Systems
Despite increasingly sophisticated library automation, the data on books in libraries is often hard to come by.
Ask The Chefs: Books That Changed Your Life
We’ve all been touched by a book, one influenced us in some profound way. This month we asked the Chefs to tell us about those books.