The Web-scale University Press | The Scholarly Kitchen
abernard102@gmail.com 2013-11-09
Summary:
"Shana Kimball, who is now with the New York Public Library,recently tweeted that she yearns for a Web-scale university press. She is not alone. Shana employed the hashtag #want, which is capacious, as it could include such things as Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and the discovery of original footage of the Beatles performing in Hamburg. But in the tiny world of scholarly communications, where we ask for little and get less, a Web-scale publishing service would be a very good thing indeed. For journals we have PLoS, our one significant exemplar, but for scholarly books we have nothing. It is not insignificant that Shana’s comment came to me via Twitter (as do most things), which is not, strictly speaking, a Web application. To operate at Web scale now means to embrace other platforms as well, whether they be mobile apps or clever exploitations of SMS, as is Twitter, or anything else–and here it is useful to remember that print is no longer an alternative to digital media but simply one other expression of it. Academic publishers have many of the pieces in place (books on the Kindle, social media marketing plans, the sale of PDFs from their Web sites), but what’s missing is the glue to hold it all together and the ability to operate on a planetary scale."