What Is Publishing? A Report from THATCamp Publishing

How is academic publishing adapting to the Internet? This October, I took part in THATCamp Publishing in Baltimore, an “unconference” that explored some pressing new questions, such as

1.Who should publish digital scholarly research?
2.Should digital academic research be published by the university press, or the university library?
3.How should the process of peer review change?
4.And finally, who should provide the work that goes into producing a publication—editing, peer review, administration and graphics?

THATCamp Publishing provided a forum for three stakeholders in this changing industry: traditional academic publishers, libraries-as-publishers, and faculty. While traditional publishers are interested in the bottom line, libraries-as-publishers are focused on the problem of access. Faculty, on the other hand, are concerned with how their publications will lead to promotion, tenure, and the advancement of knowledge. THATCamp Publishing highlighted how the evaporation of funding for scholarly publishing and the rise of the Internet as a low-cost, easy-access means of dissemination are radically changing the nature of this industry, and the inter-relationships of these three stakeholders.

British Library Group Sticks With Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell - Big Deal

A major British library group announced today that it has struck new deals with Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell, two of the largest publishers of academic journals. The group, Research Libraries U.K., had threatened to discontinue so-called Big Deal subscription arrangements with the two publishers because of what it called unsustainable price increases. U.S. libraries have also been re-examining whether Big Deals are really worth what they cost.

We need a 'JISC'  in SA!  (Eileen)

Cambridge U. Press Would Like to Rent You an Article

Will researchers pay for short-term access to journal articles? Cambridge University Press is about to find out. The publisher has just announced a rental program for articles from the more than 280 peer-reviewed journals it publishes.

Research in the News - new service from Emerald

 FREE access to a selection of our latest research in the fields of business and management, library and information science, social sciences, engineering, linguistics and audiology.

Scholarly publishing should be free

Another dreamer??
Author suggests:   get rid of for-profit scholarly publishing altogether and let the libraries again host the work of their scholars, as it once was. This new decentralised, federated database of scholarly work would be all the below and more: A single semantic, decentralised, federated database of literature and data; Personalised filtering, sorting and discovery; Peer-review administrated by an independent body; All the metrics you (don't) want (but need); Tagging, bookmarking etc.;Technically feasible today.