For anyone who has been in this profession for longer than about 10 minutes, it’s become abundantly clear that an asteroid has collided with the academic publishing industry --that its dustclouds have already nearly extinguished our old systems for producing and distributing scholarship in the humanities. The traditional models simply aren’t viable any more, so the question KF and others are asking is...what should replace or supplement them? Both [KF] and John Holbo have envisioned an electronic imprint of freely licensed content that is managed in a cooperative fashion. Beyond that details are hazy–necessarily so at this stage....The consensus seems to be that the monograph reconceived should preserve the function of the book but incorporate some of the social aspects of blogs, the self-regulating properties of Wikipedia, and the open-access values of creative commons licensing....[Jimmy Wales] expressed his wish that one day we would think it odd that anyone would publish content that had been peer-reviewed by only two or three readers, as opposed to hundreds or thousands.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/02/2005 08:45:00 AM.
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.
