Barbara Fister and Niko Pfund, We're Not Dead Yet!Library Journal, November 15, 2004. An excellent two-part story (one by Fister and one by Pfund) on what's wrong with the journal system, how it hurts book publishing, and one promising alternative.
Excerpt from Fister: 'So, I'm in my library, paying for journals that mostly don't get read, buying rights to articles for individuals to use and toss, and hoping like hell some other library will buy the books we need. I mean, at least one library's going to buy a copy, right? What a dope. Sure, I heard the ugly rumors that university presses are in trouble, that books that used to sell 3000 copies now are lucky to sell 300. I know there's a crisis out there, but everybody calls it a "serials crisis." I'm busy blaming Elsevier and Kluwer, telling the scientists to get their act together. Only I wake up one morning and find out that thanks to me, Northeastern University Press is close to death.'
Excerpt from Pfund: 'Clearly, the time for hand-wringing has come to an end. We simply must conjure a more effective and versatile delivery format for academic content, especially in the humanities and social sciences, before one is created for us. That may mean managing our print businesses into decline even as we invent a new model for disseminating our content, even if that new model is complementary rather than a simple substitute. The problem, of course, is that few presses have the resources—human, financial, technical—to drive a move online....I hope, fervently, that future generations of librarians and scholars won't look back on this era and ask, "Why did you all sit on your hands while commercial entities colonized the online world?"'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/15/2004 08:58:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
