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Clay Shirky's look at the current Amazon/Publisher wars: "The legacy system is mainly characterized by a refusal to deal in small-batch authorship, a model that made sense when the unit price of a book was any number above zero, but makes no sense today. If ten million people think something is dreck, and fifty people like it, those fifty should get what they want."

Amazon-Hachette war & Orwell: http://www.idealog.com/blog/amazon-channels-orwell-latest-blast/

Does Amazon kill a revenue channel for open access monographs? https://www.martineve.com/2014/09/03/does-amazon-kill-a-revenue-channel-for-open-access-monographs/

Michael Eisen is a researcher at UC Berkley and a co-founder of Public Library of Science. He discusses the news that the American Association for the Advancement of Science named Kent Anderson as its new Publisher, who is a critic of the open access movement. The most interesting thing for me was the mention in his blog post as well as in the comments section by another, that it is perhaps a trend for scholarly publications to produce open access journals. A peculiar motive, to perhaps "own" the open movement? It would be interesting to learn more about this trend, motivations behind it, and the implications on how that affects the OA movement.

And then a quick Google search found an announcement that Nature will be fully open access as of 20 October 2014... but still costs $5,200 USD to cover the article processing charges - perhaps Universities should (will) start to pay these costs instead of the high costs of subscriptions to scholarly journals as they continue to open up their access. http://www.nature.com/ncomms/open_access/index.html

Wow--these article publishing charges are ridiculous. I don't know if the scholars whose work gets published in these esteemed journals have budgets that would allow them to cover such fees, but I am sure that I wouldn't be able to get multiple articles covered by grants for my own work in the social sciences. And I'm 99% sure that the public universities I've worked for would not be ponying up that kind of money to cover my publication fees. This seems like yet another way to penalize scholars working in fields that don't get big grants or living in countries that don't have this kind of money to throw around. I prefer the UK's policy of requiring all nationally funded research to be published open access without any publication fees. That's the only way to even the playing field.

We encourage library publishers (and friends of library publishing) to submit proposals and/or attend the Forum, including both administrators and technical staff charged with this important scholarly communications function. The Library Publishing Forum will include representatives from a broad, international spectrum of academic library backgrounds, as well as groups that collaborate with libraries to publish scholarly works including the digital humanities.

"This article argues for a model of university-level (graduate and undergraduate) publishing education that builds upon a vocational self-identification of incoming students, nurtures a community of practice and professional discourse, and in doing so generates and renews the very culture of publishing. In times of transition and disruption, this is a role uniquely suited to the university, where an environment of collaborative research, development, and innovation can be cultivated. "

Kevin: Muchas gracias por la referencia. Es interesante no solo el artículo que mencionas sino varios de los textos del número monográfico, http://tinyurl.com/nvoq8xq. Dear Kevin: Thank you very much for the info. Interestingly, not only the article but several of the texts of special issue.

"The trouble is that impact factor of journals where researchers publish their work is a poor surrogate to measure an individual researcher's accomplishments. "

Una mirada crítica al acceso abierto: Nature 495, 426-429 (28 March 2013) doi:10.1038/495426a http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676 As that lack of enthusiasm demonstrates, the fundamental force driving the speed of the move towards full open access is what researchers - and research funders - want. Eisen says that although PLoS has become a success story - publishing 26,000 papers last year - it didn't catalyse the industry to change in the way that he had hoped. "I didn't expect publishers to give up their profits, but my frustration lies primarily with leaders of the science community for not recognizing that open access is a perfectly viable way to do publishing," he says.

La cuestión es que no hay quien ofrezca una opción sólida que pueda remplazar al Factor de Impacto. La comunidad científica lo ha adoptado cómo "LA" manera en que se puede medir el desempeño de los investigadores en el mundo. Y ese supuesto es hegemónico en el mundo. Tan es así que Scielo, a pesar de ser un repositorio en acceso abierto que sigue la filosofía de dar a conocer la producción científica latinoamericana, se decanto por generar indicadores bibliométricos de la mano de Thomson-Reuters y entrar al Web of Science. Esto no es asunto menor, es un indicador definitivo de que el dominio del FI no decaerá. Esto repercute directamente con la política científica nacional de cada país. En México CONACYT evalúa a los miembros del SNI mediante sus publicaciones en SCOPUS -pidiendo como evidencia las citaciones en este sistema de información. En Colombia, PUBLINDEX colocá revistas en A1 por el hecho de ser JCR-WoS u SJR-SCOPUS. Esto es innegable y seguirá pasando. Es por ello que iniciativas regionales de Acceso Abierto en América Latina (ya sean repositorios, leyes, etc:) ofrecen una posibilidad diferente que debe ser explotada por los investigadores de la región para mejorar la visibilidad de su producción. Del mismo modo, es ahí donde espacios como este MOOC deben ser valorados por su capacidad para diseminar la cultura del conocimiento abierto.

"Responding to rapid and steep increases in the cost of scientific journals, a growing number of scholars and librarians have advocated "open access" (OA) to the scientific literature. OA publishing models are having a significant impact on the dissemination of scientific information. Despite the success of these initiatives, their impact on researchers in the developing world is uncertain. This article analyses major OA approaches adopted in the industrialized world (so-called Green OA, Gold OA, and OA mandates, as well as non-OA information philanthropy) as they relate to the consumption and production of research in the developing world. The article concludes that while the consumption of scientific literature by developing world researchers is likely to be significantly enhanced through such programs, promoting the production of research in the developing world requires additional measures. These could include the introduction of better South-focused journal indexing systems that identify high-quality journals published in the developing world, coupled with the adjustment of academic norms to reward publication in such journals. Financial models must also be developed to decrease the reliance by institutions in the developing world on information philanthropy and to level the playing field between OA journals in industrialized and developing countries."

Proposes an alternative future where author self-publish their work for peer review outside of traditional journals.

Si, porque también se menciona, como dice en su proposición, Harvie et al. (2014) hacen un magnífico trabajo que describe los hechos exasperantes de la actual académico panorama editorial. Todos sabemos cómo funciona el sistema y cómo se juega el juego. Lo que se quiere dar a conocer una realidad alternativa facilitada por la plataforma de revisión por pares abierto gratuito, libre y sugerir acciones concretas que ayuden al movimiento científico comunidad hacia un sistema de evaluación de conocimientos y el intercambio más abierto y eficiente que se divorcia de revisión por pares desde la publicación de revistas.

The proposed alternative future is achievable, but not without resistance of traditional publishing, I think.

"The debate on open access is a debate about the future of academia. We discuss the problems of for-profit academic publishing, such as monopoly prices and access inequalities and point at the limits of contemporary perspectives on open access as they are frequently advanced by the publishing industry, policy makers and labour unions. "

"The five-chapter essay (5000+ words) is titled, "From Papyrus to Pixels: The Digital Transformation Has Only Just Begun" and is available in web or book-like formats. It can also be listened to. It includes several charts and a bibliography is also included."

Very good essay about the future of books. I particularly liked chapter two where you get a kind of mixed image of the current state of the book; on the one hand, it is stated that e-book sales are declining to the benefit of the physical book, but on the other hand it discusses how giants like Amazon has a very negative effect on the book business. Interesting for sure!

You are here: Home / Uncat / Publishing: The Economist Publishes an Online Essay About the Future of the Book Filed by on The five-chapter essay (5000+ words) is titled, "From Papyrus to Pixels: The Digital Transformation Has Only Just Begun" and is available in web or book-like formats.

"implying that publishers have willfully disregarded their ethical responsibilities over profits: And my theory is that academic publishing has drifted so far from its original idealistic roots with scientists taking care of the whole last step in the scientific process, from experiment to sharing the news about it, [that] in this world of the Internet and expensive publishing processes, basically a cottage industry grew up that has now grown into a massive multi-billion dollar industry that has become estranged from the ideals, that were probably naïve to begin with. But you can be idealistic and do a good job and make a profit. That is not mutually exclusive."

This is core notes from a one day seminar in 2012 (http://www.stm-assoc.org/events/academic-and-professional-publishing-in-south-africa/) on academic publishing in South Africa and Africa. in South Africa it would seem that there are many barriers to prevent scholars from producing and publishing their work. Although these barriers are a huge concern, there is a wealth of information being gathered and research being completed. This article is interesting as it shortly summarizes the challenges for academic work to get published in Africa.

Trends in the production and distribution of self-published ebooks.

Very interesting. Let me share on twitter. Thank you.

"The motivation for my own authorial decision to turn my back on traditional publishers was both psychological and entrepreneurial. The psychological was purely personal. I am a Depression baby. My father was hard hit during the Depression and it was difficult for him to get and hold a job. He was always at the mercy of others, and I vowed early on never to be beholden to others to make my living. Controlling my own destiny has always been one of my principal obsessions."

I have used the term mind-blowing in 30 years or so but this is truly mind blowing. The link is to one of the talks at April's TED conference last month. (Follow the like for an explanation of the conferences.) This one is truly inspirational - and for those of you in publishing - you may know of it already (2011)...a true ebook.

I have used the term mind-blowing in 30 years or so but this is truly mind blowing. The link is to one of the talks at April's TED conference last month. (Follow the like for an explanation of the conferences.) This one is truly inspirational - and for those of you in publishing - you may know of it already (2011)...a true ebook.

"For the past couple of decades, scholarly publishers have been populating their websites and content stores with a wealth of valuable research material. Such efforts have resulted in vast amounts of information online but the quantity of scholarly information is far too great for researchers to simply browse, find, digest and use everything. For this reason there has been an increasing interest amongst publishers in the topic of semantic enrichment, enhancing information with intelligent structure, tagging and vocabularies to improve discoverability of related and relevant resources. "

"What solutions might we find within our community to solve the problem of rising textbook prices? In our latest issue brief, Nancy Maron, Ithaka S+R's Program Director for Sustainability and Scholarly Communications, looks at recent trends in textbook publishing and suggests that collaborations between university presses and academic libraries might yield a new breed of textbook more aligned to the needs of faculty and students."