Plan S seems to favor larger, commercial publishers over smaller, independent, not-for-profit publishers. Is this an acceptable sacrifice or are societies, and not-for-profit publishing, worth preserving?
At the Charleston conference this year, a panel on the library’s role in providing affordable textbooks showed the way to great savings and innovation in instructional materials.
Institutional and consumer markets are becoming more closely linked because of Amazon’s powerful value proposition, making it necessary for academic book publishers to create consumer services of their own.
Leann Wilson and Marshall Poe revisit the idea of a unified online books platform for scholarly works.
Sharing research with the public is critical, and there are multiple platforms and approaches to this kind of outreach. We tried a local book group for sharing both scholarship and the scholarly process.
We have had assumptions about the academic book market that probably are just not true.
Perhaps the academy has not taken control of scholarly publishing because it doesn’t want to.
Mark Edington suggests that the scholarly communications community needs clear definitions and standards for how peer review is performed, and that transparent reporting on peer review should be a standard part of a publication.
A conference at the British Library provides ample evidence of the breadth of the university press sector and the absolute necessity of a clear institutional mission.
Testimonials to the importance of university presses.
Knowledge Unlatched has announced its “transformation into a central open access platform.” What does that mean, exactly? An interview with Managing Director Sven Fund.
What kind of peer review is developing to evaluate long-form digital scholarship? A view from AAUP press editors.
Use of printed books in large North American research libraries is falling even faster than we think.
The book is asked to perform many tasks, some of which are not necessarily the best use of the book format, whether in print or electronically. The long-form text, which may be print or digital, is a different matter, and is likely to remain with us and be called “a book” for some time to come.
The UK Scholarly Communications License repeats many of the stumbles of the original monolithic and mandatory OA policies. We urge its proponents to slow down and learn from them instead.