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 Jun 23, 2009, 03:47 PM

This transcript from an NPR piece on Social Networks and how they are growing by the millions but still can't pay for themselves.   One person they interviewed on this subject was Fred Stutzman, of the University of North Carolina, and who was the first Director of Social Networking for the HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition.   As readers of my Cat in the Stack blog know, I worry a lot about all the way that "information wants to be free"----but is costing someone a lot.   How it eventually pays for itself is the issue, and there are good thoughts in this essay.  Here's the url and an excerpt of Fred's smart comments.

 

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jun 04, 2009, 10:29 AM

Scott Jaschik has a new piece in INSIDE HIGHER ED on "The Split Over Open Access." Here's the url: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/04/open

 

Some University Press publishers signed a petition in favor of open access. Others argued that they believe in the principle but their universities hold them accountable to a bottom line as if they are businesses---and you cannot be expected to make a profit AND be expected to give away your only marketable product for free. This is the dilemma, and it is one that is also the subjet of Chris Anderson's new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Anderson is also the editor of Wired Magazine and the author of The Long Tail. He is concerned (as I have been in many essays, columns, and blogs over the last decade) with the inherent contradictions in the idea that "information wants to be free" when it costs something to produce that information. Who pays the price of consumer's "free" choices? And, in the scholarly world, if we are evaluated on our publications, if our universities insist that our scholarly publishers break even, and yet if we want them to give away their products for free, who profits in the long run and who suffers? These are very important questions.

 

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Mar 13, 2008, 04:03 PM
Harvard's recent Open Access publishing mandate makes me think about what it would look like to make a national, interoperable open archive, across all of the libraries, across all the electronic archives, and that took into consideration production as well as consumption in its general business plan. Can't we all get along? (Aphorism for the day: We are all interconnected. You cannot starve one person in the food chain and expect to have a banquet at the end.)