A MITH COFFEEHOUSE CONVERSATION on SCHOLARLY ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING

A MITH COFFEEHOUSE CONVERSATIONon SCHOLARLY ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING

What do we need to take into account?

* CONTEXT: Academic capitalism

* NEW COMMODITIES: intellectual property

* SHIFTS IN RESEARCH: national competitiveness shifts peers and audiences

* SHIFTS IN PRESENTATION MEDIA: documents, aesthetics, materialities

* WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE "ONLINE"?: when is this "publishing"?

Some links:

http://www.doaj.org/
Directory of open access journals

http://creativecommons.org/
Creative Commons licensing

The Access Principle : The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship
by John Willinsky
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10611

https://drum.umd.edu/dspace/help/about_drum.jsp
DRUM provides digital repository services for the University of Maryland. Currently there are three types of materials in our collections: faculty deposited documents, a Library managed collection of UM doctoral dissertations, and a collection of technical reports.
As a digital repository, DRUM provides a distribution service by making files available via the Internet. Descriptive information on the available documents is distributed freely to search engines. As a repository, files are maintained on DRUM for the long term. Unlike the web, where pages come and go and addresses to resources can change overnight, repository items have a permanent URL and the institution is committed to maintaining the service into the future.

Answers to common questions about the new NIH Public Access Policy
http://www.lib.umd.edu/CLMD/INSTREP/NIHFAQs.html

http://vectors.iml.annenberg.edu/
Vectors is published twice a year. Each ‘issue’ crystallizes around a key theme that highlights the social, political, and cultural stakes of our increasingly technologically-mediated existence. Every iteration of Vectors includes two types of projects. First, Vectors features commissioned multimedia works produced through collaboration between scholars and the Vectors’ creative team. These projects are selected through a rigorous fellowship competition that brings together recipients for a week-long summer residency focused on both individual project development as well as on issues of scholarly research and publication in the digital era.

More Academic Capitalism
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~slaughtr/MoreAcCapitalism.htm

Capitalism, Academic Style, and Shared Governance
http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/2005/05mj/05mjrhoa.htm
In response we need "a commitment to debate, dissent, and diversity over short-term efficiency, revenues, and expert management."

Bibliography on scholarly publishing and intellectual property
http://epress.lib.uh.edu/pr/v6/n1/lcopyr.htm

Journal of Electronic Publishing
http://www.hti.umich.edu/j/jep/
* Library budgets are flat or declining while the cost of academic publishing is increasing and being passed on to the consumers.
* The market for University Press books does not generate enough revenue to support the print publication of scholarly works and the Presses have not developed a business model for electronic publication that creates significant returns. In order to continue to publish, the Presses then require significant institutional subsidies. Most academic institutions do not provide such subsidies, forcing the Presses to close, to publish non-academic books to bring in enough money to continue to operate, or to increases prices further, thus narrowing their market even more.
* Small publication units within the academy of scholarly societies are finding it increasingly difficult to cover the costs of editorial development and print production. These units increasingly either fold entirely or sign on with large commercial publishers (in either case relieving competitive pressure on commercial academic publishing). Since these smaller publishing ventures have traditionally been the venue for scholarship that is perceived as having less economic value (notably the humanities and the "soft" social sciences), their disappearance or loss of independence threatens important platforms for part of our intellectual dialogue and cultural heritage.

...In addition, scholarly communication has been bedeviled by increasingly restrictive and complex rights agreements that often remove the control of intellectual assets from both the scholars who create them and the academic institutions that subsidize them. In the current intellectual property climate, authors and researchers often sign away their rights, forcing sponsoring institutions to purchase access to the very scholarship they have made possible. Even when an institution has bought such access, usually through its library, the scholarship is still not always available for the full range of teaching, research, and creative activities desired by faculty and students.

...SPO is one such experiment in library-based publishing...SPO hopes to become a model for other library-based publishing efforts. This model helps to shape the future of academic publishing by changing the way the academy thinks about disseminating its scholarly and creative work.
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0009.102

http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0009.107Varieties of Poetry Publishing and Aesthetics on the Internet
by Frank Menchaca

This article considers the many forms poetry publishing on the Internet has taken and how technology has influenced the distribution as well as the aesthetics of poetry, in terms of reading and composition. The article cites examples of how poets have employed tools such as flash to create online reading experiences that differ fundamentally from those of the page. Blurring of boundaries between genres--poetry and prose, the expressly literary and non-literary--is also examined in relation to technology. The article assesses the economics of online publication as enabling new voices to emerge.