Open Access publishing is ever proving the future for scholarly publications, both books and journals. The Australian reports that Harvard University has had enough of paying exorbitant journal subscriptions:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/journals-too-expensive-go-open-access-harvard-decree/story-e6frgcjx-1226339169404
The front cover showing a detail of the original United States Bill of Rights
We officially release Freedom of Religion under Bills of Rights this evening with a launch in the University of Adelaide’s Ira Raymond Room by the Chief Justice of South Australia, the Hon. John Doyle AC.
19 international contributors take varying perspectives on the impact of bills of rights in a range of countries with and without a bill. Click on the book cover to go to the webpage and find out more. The FREE PDF edition is already available to download immediately.
Around universities world-wide more and more scientists are asking how much they need Elsevier and other huge publishers making a fortune publishing their journals. For example, in 2011 Elsevier reported a bigger profit margin than Apple. Unlike Apple, they are not paying for the core product they are selling: scientific research. Worse still, they often charge their contributors and then sell it back to their very own universities, making their money twice:
http://the-scientist.com/2012/03/19/opinion-academic-publishing-is-broken/
Publishing scholarly books and articles directly online is one of the great innovations of the digital age. There are some scamsters out there, however, who take advantage in particular of young researchers under pressure to publish.
The most recent Chronicle of Higher Education (9 March, page A6) discusses the strategy employed by one company who contacted a young researcher inviting a journal article submission, and then sent her a bill for $1800. She refused to pay, but the article was published regardless without any apparent editing, reviewing or the slightest correcting. If you don’t have a subscription, you can go direct to Jeffrey Beall’s Scholarly Open Access blog where he lists publishers to avoid.
The book that we know and trust, with printed paper pages and bound in any number of covers, began life around 1439 when Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type.
The impact was immediate and long-lasting. Suddenly texts that could only be hand-copied in small numbers and circulated among a tightly controlled few could be reproduced by the hundreds and then the thousands and sold at affordable prices. Knowledge spread, and enabled the modern world – courtesy of the massively increased exchange and accessibility of ideas – and we had the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, science and education.
Before the Gutenberg press, much knowledge in Europe then was kept by the Roman Catholic Church. Victor Hugo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame imagines a group of bishops scoffing at the new technology, and convinced that it wouldn’t last, and worrying about the threat to them if ordinary people had access to books.
Almost 700 years later, we are living in another revolution of the book.
The catch with the printed books is they still cost a lot of money to edit and design properly, and distribute. They’re heavy. Books that haven’t been selling enough to make back that money have increasingly been missing out, even if they have good knowledge. Scholarly books, the product of original thought and research in a specialised field, have been dropping in sales down to an average of 350 world-wide by 2007.
The e-book has allowed scholarly books a renaissance and already many are being downloaded in the 10s of 1000s, by people who never would have had the chance to buy them. The new e-book readers are increasingly as reliable as a book in print, and being dynamic will challenge the old static printed page.
New technology starts off awkwardly, and it’s easy for the scoffers to mock it. The iPads and the Kindles and so on are just that awkward start. In the West, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment enabled democracies, and individual rights such as had never been conceived possible. The e-book, and the accompanying shorter means of communication such as twitter, facebook, email, texts and instant messaging, is surely the dawn of a new era which we cannot yet even guess at.
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Going mad about ebook formats?
The PDF is still holding its ground as a reliable format that you can read anywhere, and own and share it the same way you can own physical books. This blogger doesn’t think the other restrictive ebook formats will survive:
http://gyrovague.com/