Publishing News
http://www.open.ac.uk/new/distance-learning.shtml The Open University in the UK is one of the longest established open learning universities and is now thoroughly online. With 200,000 students enrolled at any one time, 580 undergraduate and postgraduate courses and at an average cost to each student for a 3 year undergraduate degree course of £4,100 ($6,150) the success of the OU is plain to see. 80% of OU undergraduates are in paid employment.
A short but informative article of particular interest to publishers on “Fair use and distance learning in the digital age” by Millison Smith which addresses controversial legislation on access to copyright material by distance learners.
http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb010423-1.htm MIT announced in April 2001 that all the course material used with undergraduate and graduate students at MIT would be made available free of charge online for access anywhere in the world. Note: This initiative is not distance education which requires considerable investment of time and resources in the essential support of students and interaction between and within groups.
A new blog “Search Done Right” from the proprietor of vivisimo could be worth watching. It is at - http://searchdoneright.com. The aim is to explore the latest trends, challenges, and news related to search and search technology. The first posts are up and reader commentary is enabled and welcome.
The Tasini Ruling: What the Future Holds - For a brief and clear overview of the "Tasini case" in which freelance writers won a major ruling from the US Supreme Court when the court ruled that companies must obtain freelancer's permission for republishing their work on the Internet. Exactly how much money will be distributed to freelance writers who are affected by this ruling has not yet been determined.
The annual Society for Scholarly Publishers (SSP) meeting in Boston in 2008 included many interesting sessions on “Inventing the future of scholarly publishing” essentially the impact and outcomes of so-called web 2.0. A summary of the meeting is available here but a small list of think points drawn from this meeting for consideration follow:
- Be very clear about access rights and policies and work with and support community platforms.
- Content portals position a publisher for the article economy and give the opportunity to experiment further with access models.
- Before investing in virtual online venues, investigate where customers hold accounts and what they are doing on existing sites - lectures and conferences are most profitable and popular so far.
- Handling reviewers is becoming one of the biggest if not the biggest challenge facing editorial offices.
Note that Ingenta has partnered with Baynote to provide an article recommendation service that is similar to the large consumer sites. According to the Baynote site, “recommendations are automatic suggestions given to web site users that help them find products or content they like or need. It works with any type of content: products, articles, PDFs, videos, advertising, and more. Think of it as Amazon's suggestion system that is now available for any business web site.”
A brief summary of the author-side payments implemented in the past year or so by the largest commercial publishers as they experiment with Open Access to primary research articles through hybrid OA models. Notice the different names given below to each of the programs offered by these publishers.
Publisher
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Author - side fee per article
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Which journals?
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Blackwell see:
Blackwell Publishing - Online Open
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$2,500 in 2006
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108 out of 805
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Elsevier see:
Elsevier - Article Sponsorship
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$3,000
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6 in nuclear physics
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Springer see:
Springer - Open Choice
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$3,000
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All science
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Taylor and Francis see:
iOpen Access
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$3,100
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175 chemistry, math and physics
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John Wiley see:
John Wiley - Funded access
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$3,000
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45 biomedical
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Copyright in E-mail - A short overview of US copyright protection is included in the article "Copyright in e-mail" by Thomas G. Field. The article addresses all aspects including e-mail discussion lists and is essential reading for any publisher hosting or developing a community of users through e-mail.
Oxford University Press scaled up its Open Access experiment with Oxford Open at $2,800 per article and a discount to researchers whose institutions already have a current online subscription.
Tenopir and King’s article on “An evidence-based assessment of the impact of the author pays model” is a clear overview of some of the core issues and includes some perhaps surprising facts, such as only 15- 20% of US scientists have authored a refereed article.
The American Institute of Physics announced an experiment with the Open Access business model. From January 2005 authors of 3 AIP journals can pay $2,000 for their articles to be freely available online on publication. AIP have made a commitment to reduce their online subscription prices proportional to the uptake of this option.
For an interesting retrospective on online only publication of articles by the journal Pediatrics. The article includes plenty of data and analysis on the citation of articles published online versus print. Author perceptions of the differences between print and online publication are also explored.
http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/icsu/kingppr.htm "Economic Cost Models of Scientific Scholarly Journals" by Donald W. King and Carol Tenopir. This report establishes trends and provides data regarding authorship, publishing, distribution and use of scientific scholarly journals.
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