Group items tagged

Oxford University Press editorial policy comes under fire.  The president of OUP will be a keynote speaker at this year's Ethics and Publishing Conference.

I was reading about the small window that opened the other day in the "Great Firewall of China" and then read this article. It bothers me that so many people seem to be ready to send printing presses to a junkyard and rely entirely on electronic distribution of information. First, there is still a HUGE demographic who does not have regular access to the internet. Secondly, what would happen if all of our information could be controlled with a filtering program? And finally, printed material still gets into places that a computer cannot. I read an opinion piece in the NYT before Christmas that discussed how an Afghanistan woman learned to read with the help of her young daughter and the newspaper pieces that wrapped her fish. Are we turning information into something elitist? Is there a parallel between a push to make everything electronic - so only people with Kindles and laptops can get information, and a time not-so-long-ago when literacy was a class distinction? DO WE REALLY WANT TO CREATE A NEW CLASS DISTINCTION BY RESTRICTING INFORMATION TO ONLY THOSE WHO CAN AFFORD ACCESS TO IT?

Fascinating points!!! The printed word has been responsible for the American colonists ability to read the words of the great Thomas Paine and Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin and perhaps be inspired to foment the continued revolt that brought us America. It brought the thoughts of the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and Adolf Hitler to the world. For good, and less so, the printed word has been a catalyst for change that has moved the world and impacted people around the globe. While there are many who have access to the Internet and PC, there are far greater numbers around the world who have no such access, for them even a phone is a luxury. Many represent the populations of the third world, but high numbers are the disadvantaged right here at home or in other developed nations around the globe. When oppressive regimes and less then optimal economic or geographic conditions prevent technology from bringing information via wire or air wave, the printing press will continue to spread the message. Education, found in the pages of textbooks, passed down from generation to generation or moved around the world, bring knowledge and potential to those who have no access to the Internet. Until, in some distant future when the earth is truly the global nation envisioned by some futurists today, the printing press will hold its place as a global facilitator of knowledge and information.

As more journals shift from being run by university presses and scholarly societies to corporate entities, the goal is better management, better sales (since packages of journals are frequently sold together) and economies of scale. The fear of some involved in journal publishing is that corporate interests will limit the role of scholars in making key decisions.

Government interference with journalism is a problem, but how do you address it in countries with different forms of government and views on freedom?

Author-pays model meets bottom-line publisher. The vanity press of scholarly publication?

iPublishCentral, a self-service digital content publishing, marketing, warehousing and distribution platform, will allow participating AAUP members to market books on the Internet, sell content online, and promote brands and titles across the Web. Among the three core components of iPublishCentral are market, distribute and deliver.

How much evidence of borrowing is required before charges of plagiarism are reasonable?  

A review of the 2012 Conference on Ethics and Publishing.

Benchmarkreviews.com reviews office equipment, and posts a review about a chair that sounds ... off. It turns out that the review lifts phrases and content from press releases about the chair. Benchmarkreviews responds by permanently banning the person investigating the plagiarism -- and publishing his real name, address and phone number.

Laws on Cyberbullying are increasing in US

Green initiatives are prevalent throughout most industries these days, including publishing. But how sustainable are our publishing practices? Dennis Stovall, director of the publishing program at Portland State University and publisher at Ooligan Press, tackles this topic in the following interview.

More and more, it seems, the new books that really attract me don't come from the major trade publishers. That doesn't mean that New York isn't bringing out good books or that I don't read plenty of titles from trade houses. But I think that as people grow more sure of their tastes, they often gravitate to those specialized subgenres that particularly appeal to them, or to the more unusual or even minor work from writers they especially care about, and that usually means specialty presses.

A heavily corrected unfinished draft of an early Jane Austen manuscript sold at auction at Sotheby's in London on Thursday for almost 1 million pounds ($1.6 million), three times the estimated presale price, The Associated Press reported. The draft of "The Watsons" went to an unidentified buyer; Sotheby's said it is the only major manuscript by Austen still in private hands.

Wed Jul 13, 2011 8:36am EDT The journalistic improprieties keep piling up on both sides of the Atlantic as one journalist was fired and another suspended for plagiarism this week. The Kansas City Star dismissed columnist Steve Penn for copying material from press releases and claiming the opinions of other writers were his own.