Academic Libraries Should Consider a Strategic Approach to Promotion and Marketing of e-Books by Nazi Torabi

Scholarly information - past, present and future

Editor Sian Harris spoke about changes in the scholarly publishing industry at Online Information 2011. Topics included e-journals, e-books, access, data and predictions for the future.

Source : Research Information
15 December 2011

‘Choice’ Names Its Top 25 Academic Books for 2011

Editors at Choice, a publication of the Association for College and Research Libraries, have named their top 25 academic titles for the year, along with a top 10 of Web sites. The alphabetical, non-ranked list of 25 titles sees university presses and trade houses running neck and neck with university presses 12 books, trade publishers 12 books, and a skirmish sure to develop over where to slot Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. While not an AAUP member, CSHL says it’s on a “campus,” so we say no contest.

Choice’s full “Outstanding Academic Titles, 2011″ list comprises 629 titles across 54 disciplines and appears in the magazine’s January 2012 issue. Non-subscribers can register for a free online trial to check it out.

The Troubled Future of the 19th-Century Book

The future is uncertain for circulating library collections in the wake of wide-scale digitization, and particularly so for scholars who study the "long" 19th century. Let me explain. In most cases, pre-1800 books have been moved to special collections, and, under the 1998 copyright law, post-1923 materials remain in copyright and thus on the shelves for circulation. But academic libraries are now increasingly reconfiguring access to public-domain texts via online repositories such as Google Books and the HathiTrust Digital Library. As a result, library policy makers are anticipating the withdrawal of less-used print collections of books that are not rare in favor of digital surrogates. Large portions of 19th-century print materials will fall into that category.

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.

Weekly Quote

"Only one thing, is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet."

Mark Twain

Tomorrow's Academic Libraries: Maybe Even Some Books

Imagine a library that is not only bookless but is not necessarily tied to a building, one that takes its personnel and services to patrons rather than expecting them to come to it. Two projects—one now under way at the undergraduate level and one well established at a medical library—suggest where the untethered library is headed. One approach focuses on space; the other on librarians.

Academic libraries have been beset by changes that have led some observers to wonder whether they have a future at all. Their budgets have been hit hard even as the cost of buying and storing information—whether print monographs or journal databases—continues to climb. Search engines have replaced librarians as the go-to source of information for most researchers. And students headed to the library now are more likely to be in search of a cup of coffee than to be looking for a book. If they do want a book, it might have been moved to remote storage because the library has run out of room.

At Johns Hopkins U., embedded librarians like Victoria H. Goode work in classrooms and labs to help health-care students with their research needs.