Comments on: Executive Summary

By: Brian Sheppard

Brian Sheppard — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 19:29:47 +0000

This relates to an earlier comment, but I find the use of the singular, in terms of technology platforms, to be vaguely ominous. It risks being monolithic if not monopolistic.

By: Brian Sheppard

Brian Sheppard — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 19:12:07 +0000

The appeal of the "third-party enterprise" has appeal to administrators who fear the risks of local investment. But it's not clear such an enterprise could be sufficiently flexible or responsive to accommodate varying needs. I don't doubt there will be a tendency toward larger technological platforms, but technological diversity and, to some extent, decentralization will remain a good thing.

By: if:book: ithaka university publishing report in commentpress

if:book: ithaka university publishing report in commentpress — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 21:32:04 +0000

[...] Publishing in a Digital Age," which came out late July and which we noted here, is available within the Commentpress platform, which means all of us who would like to join a discussion around the report's findings can [...]

By: Claire Evans

Claire Evans — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 13:42:39 +0000

In August, the University of California Office of Scholarly Communication released the results of a survey of over 1,100 faculty members "with regard to several key issues in scholarly publishing and scholarly communication. The report [was] timed to inform Universitywide discussions – many of them prompted by a series of faculty white papers – about strategic responses to challenges and opportunities in the evolution of scholarly publishing and communication. The survey also provides important insight into how the University's eScholarship publishing services (including those offered in partnership with the UC Press) can meet faculty needs."

See the news release with links to PDFs at http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/responses/activities.html

This should help to round the discussion.

By: reader

reader — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 19:46:42 +0000

Too floody text to be read easily. It's not a rocket science article, why did you make it so boring and long? Stick to simpler words.

"As information transforms the landscape of scholarly publishing."

What a picturesque passage!

"We began this project with a set of hypotheses and views based on our own experience and prior discussions with people in the community. These hypotheses were tested through an extensive series of interviews with administrators, press directors, librarians, and other stakeholders on campus."

Why not make it just as "We began this project with a set of guesses obtained from different people we talked with."

No wonder you need special paragraph-based commenting tool. Please, try making this text 20 times shorter or find smb else to do it for you.

"Consumption patterns have already changed dramatically, as many scholars have increasingly begun to rely on electronic resources to get information that is useful to their research and teaching."

Yes, people, this has changed. So follow the form of electronic resources — keep it short. Absence of paper doesn't mean you must write novels where simple notes could work.

Keep it simple!

By: Mike Furlough

Mike Furlough — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 20:43:43 +0000

No question that the scholars themselves need to be at the center of any agenda for change or it will not succeed. Engaging them is the challenge, as any number of librarians beating the drums over the past decade can tell you.

The heterogeneity of needs and disciplinary norms makes it crucial to do some real exploration of our faculty and students as both authors and researchers, and understand how those identities do and don't intersect. As a starting point, I've been referring many people to the study from UC Berkely led by C Judson King and Diane Harley, described in the most recent issue of JEP:
http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3336451.0010.204

By: Peter Givler

Peter Givler — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 17:53:27 +0000

Exactly right, and unfortunately it's an old problem. Scholars weren't included in the interviews or sent questionaires; I think that was a deliberate methodological decision by the people preparing this study, and at one point I believe they planned to include scholars in a follow-up study, although I haven't heard anything more about that reecently. In any case, virtually all of the debates about the future of scholarly communication that have been going on for the last 20 years have made very little attempt to engage faculty researchers, or have done so only by proxy: when I raised this issue at a conference in the early '90s I remember being told with some asperity by a clearly offended provost that he still published research and therefore was fully capable of representing the interests of faculty researchers.

In the last few years that seems to be starting to change as scholarly societies in the humanities and social sciences have begun to raise these questions with their memberships, but there's still, in my opinion, a long way to go.

By: Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Kathleen Fitzpatrick — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 17:57:54 +0000

Yet universities do not treat the publishing function as an important, mission-centric endeavor.

This is an extremely important point, and one that I hope provosts and other higher administration officials will begin to consider seriously: "the communication and broad dissemination of knowledge" is a key part of the university's function, and yet that unit, in most universities, has been hamstrung by its requirements to hew to the bottom line. Clearly university publishing serves a role that is analogous to, and deeply intertwined with, that of university libraries. And yet no administration would ever ask its library to become a profit center, or even to focus on cost recovery. Universities must begin to consider that publishing, as a core aspect of the institution's mission, must be treated not as businesses but as infrastructure. Digital scholarly publishing, and the kinds of collaborations between libraries and presses that it affords, might be an ideal place to begin that reconsideration of publishing withing the university's mission.

By: bob stein

bob stein — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 17:39:21 +0000

i'm concerned that scholars are not regarded as a prime audience for this paper. if one of the key purposes of university presses is to encourage and enable discourse among scholars across . . . shouldn't scholars themselves be at the center of the discussion of how to structure such discourse within the digital network?