Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jan 31, 2010, 10:42 AM

Here is an update from Publisher's Lunch (a publishing industry newsletter) that details some of the dispute between Macmillan and Kindle.   This is an urgent issue for anyone who cares about books.   What happens when those who publish and those who sell books clash?   How will this be resolved?   No answers, but we all should be keeping an alert and questioning stance here because the future of the humanities is bound up with all of these issues of production, distribution, and consumption.   As I've said so many times in this blog, you cannot change one part of the equatio without disrupting the other parts as well.   

Submitted by sbrennan on Nov 18, 2009, 11:05 PM

A new model for digital scholarly publishing jumped online tonight, created by Dan Cohen, Director of the Center for History and New Media, GMU.

What's amazing is that Dan created this new publication in a few days. I like his approach: he had an idea and implemented it immediately. I think this is one trait that is shared by many digital humanists/scholars--the willingness to experiment and just do. He is assuming there will be adjustments, but wasn't afraid to go forward with an idea. I'm proud to be one of the 274 founding editors, together with some other HASTAC scholars.

Submitted by Ruby Sinreich on Oct 28, 2009, 10:33 AM

Yesterday I was invited to be on a panel speaking with a gathering of Christian publishers at Duke's Divinity School. As an introduction, I gave my standard presentation about the five aspects of effective networks, but to make it more relevant to this audience, I started with two seminal works ab

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Sep 15, 2009, 10:25 AM

Five leading universities have signed a compact that subsidies open access journals---and that will have an impact and repercussions throughout the worlds of scholarly publishing and in provost's offices everywhere. Today, I'm meeting with Duke's own Digital Futures Taskforce about our own draft open access policy and we hope also to discuss this new development. There's a great piece with more detail and links on Inside Higher Education.

Here's the url: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/09/15/open

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jul 23, 2009, 12:56 PM

If we really believe that Information Wants to Be Free, in Stewart Brand's famous phrase, then why are some of the visionaries of the Information Age rushing to old-fashioned commercial publishing to broadcast their ideas? Could it be that they've figured out that "free information" means they can't make a good living publishing on the Internet so, not exactly practicing what they preach, they turn to commercial publishing to make a profit on their ideas about the Internet?

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jul 20, 2009, 09:59 AM

Jennifer Howard, in a concise and important article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, has reported today on one of the single most important studies I've read of scholarly publishing, "The Future of Scholarly Journals Publishing Among Social Science and Humanities Associations." Here's the bottom line: publishing in the humanities and social sciences costs more than publishing in the sciences. The electronic part of those costs are relatively minor. And we need more, not less, publishing in the humanities and social science fields. Acceptance rates in the humanities and social science journals is a scant 11 percent. In comparable journals in the sciences, the acceptance rate is 42%.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jul 01, 2009, 02:56 PM

One reason I was abashed when the plagiarism accusations (justified, owned, apologized for, and, I hope, corrected)  came out about Chris Anderson's new book FREE is that I find him terrifically interesting and unusually thoughtful, even if his contribution is chiefly in raising timely questions, not answering them.  Fortunately, his unacknowledged borrowings from Wikipedia have not swamped the fact that we all urgently want a conversation on what is or isn't free and whether being free is or isn't good for us.

 

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jun 03, 2009, 12:27 PM
Excellent piece in INSIDE HIGHER ED by Scot McLemee on our own hybrid publishing moment in scholarly publishing.  It's not all electronic, it's not all conventional print, we're at a "tension point."  Read it here:  http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee244

Submitted by jonippolito on Apr 09, 2009, 12:24 PM
Academia's goal may be the free exchange of ideas, but up to now many universities have been wary--if not downright dismissive--of their professors using the Internet and other digital media to supercharge that exchange. Yet in a signal that digital scholarship is the future, the latest issue of MIT's Leonardo magazine showcases the recently approved academic guidelines of the University of Maine's New Media Department as a model for other universities to consider.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jan 27, 2009, 04:50 PM
In this reblog from SAVAGE MINDS, Chris Kelty provides very interesting insights into the first six months into his book TWO BITS: THE CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE OF FREE SOFTWARE, and comparisons between the book sales and the online downloads. Plus, guess what, the verdict is in: "The Internet is dead."