Academic E-Books: Innovation and Transition

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-08-20

Summary:

“There is a growing crisis in the academic monograph marketplace. College and university libraries are experiencing budget cuts; there are too many presses publishing too many titles; there’s growing pressure to figure out open access (OA) solutions, particularly in the face of the outrageous Research Works Act... Organizations are rallying to devise solutions, however. Libraries, presses, and scholars are pressing forward with several interesting proposals (Clifford Lynch of CNI wrote a prescient overview of the options in 2010). And I just attended an investigatory meeting, held at the Radcliffe Institute, at Harvard for one of the most promising new efforts: the development of a Global Library Constortium (GLC), the brainchild of Frances Pinter, former publisher of Bloomsbury Academic in the UK, and founder of EIFL, an international library consortium of consortia supporting greater access to information... Pinter’s proposal is worth considering in depth because its creativity sheds light on many of the issues testing academic publishing (an early description can be found in a YouTube video)... The GLC is loosely modeled on an existing academic venture called SCOAP3, which was born out of the small, highly internetworked high-energy physics (HEP) community... The GLC proposal would operate on a similar basis, with libraries pooling together into a membership coalition that purchases the rights to titles offered by participating publishers. Those books would then be made available on an open access basis, perhaps with Creative Commons license terms. Libraries would place bids for each offered title into a pool, in a fashion similar to the way Groupon works; if there was sufficient interest to hit the price trigger point, the publisher would release the title into the open access pool with costs apportioned among participating institutions. Once made open access, titles would be publicly readable through a web browser interface, but downloadable PDFs or EPUBs would only be freely available to GLC members....”

Link:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/content-and-e-books/article/50486-academic-e-books-innovation-and-transition.html

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.licensing oa.comment oa.green oa.copyright oa.libraries oa.events oa.peer_review oa.metadata oa.costs oa.books oa.google.settlement oa.repositories oa.libre oa.journals

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

08/20/2012, 15:15

Date published:

02/05/2012, 13:53