OPEN REFLECTIONS

Category: Open Access

  • More Cultural Studies = Less Uptake

    Ted Striphas, author of The Late Age of Print  (2009) recently published an interesting article in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies on the inconsistencies in the current journal publishing system, focusing specifically on the situation within the field of Cultural Studies. In his article, entitled Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Academic Journal Publishing, Striphas gives…

  • Who Owns Research?

    Or better yet, who should own research? Last Thursday CRASSH―the Cambridge based institute for Cultural Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities―assembled an expert panel from the publishing and library community to tackle this question.  Linda Bree (Cambridge University Press), Rupert Gatti (Open Book publishers), Gary Hall (Open Humanities Press) and Elin Stangeland (DSpace…

  • Governance in Times of Change

    Last week I attended the International Conference – Digital publishing and its governance: between knowledge and power, which was held from April 28th-30th in Paris. The conference was organized by Sens Public with support from INHA-Invisu, tge-ADONIS, CNRS and DARIAH. The conference focused on how digitally induced practices in the Humanities and Social Sciences are…

  • APE 2010: Open Access and Thinking Beyond the Document

    Last week I was in Berlin where I listened to some amazing talks on the future of publishing and scholarly communication delivered at the APE conference 2010. Underneath you will find a selection of what I felt to be the most interesting bits. One of the key speakers during this year’s event was Stefan Gradmann…

  • Publishing, Peer Review and Quality Certification in the Digital Age

    Every month the Special Collections department of the University of Amsterdam hosts a book salon, each focusing on a special theme. Last Thursday’s gathering focused on ‘the scientific publisher in the digital age’ and brought together a panel of three experts on the subject. Cees Andriesse, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Utrecht…

  • Scanners, collectors and aggregators. On the ‘underground movement’ of (pirated) theory text sharing

    “But as I say, let’s play a game of science fiction and imagine for a moment: what would it be like if it were possible to have an academic equivalent to the peer-to-peer file sharing practices associated with Napster, eMule, and BitTorrent, something dealing with written texts rather than music? What would the consequences be…

  • Touched by History

    The first publication of the OAPEN project has recently come to light, a collection of essays by Johan Huizinga entitled De hand van Huizinga, collected and with an introduction by Willem Otterspeer; the essays are in Dutch, via Amsterdam University Press, but will also be translated into several other languages via the other OAPEN partners,…

  • Open Access Week 2009

    At the moment I am busy researching Open Access Week 2009, which will be from October 19th until the 23rd. It will be an international event, which aims to: “(…) broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access to research, including access policies from all types of research funders, within the international higher education community and…

  • Patronage

    Kevin Kelly reports on his blog about an experimental book publishing model. In this model you first sell a required amount of (hard cover) books (in this specific case 200), enough to cover for the costs of the print run, after which the book is made available online for free as a downloadable PDF. Actually…

  • Ebooks Galore!

    This month it’s again time for the World Ebook fair! The fourth annual World Ebook Fair, this year from 7/04/09 to 8/04/09 will offer Open Access to their sponsors ebook collections consisting of more than 2 million books. During this month these ebooks will be online available for free (otherwise a membership of $8.95 per…

  • Academic Publishing must face the Inconvenient Truth

    Another thing I would like to draw your attention to is an excellent speech given by Michael Jensen at the Association of American University Presses’ (AAUP) annual meeting last June. Michael Jensen is the Director of Strategic Web Communications at the National Academies Press, one of the oldest Open Access publishers. As Wikipedia states: ‘The…

  • Where Open Philosophy meets Open Music

    Via Transversalinflections I learned about Re.Press, an Australian publisher of Open Access titles in Philosophy. Their business model is based on a free Open Access edition in combination with print sales, the model at the moment many presses are experimenting with (amongst others: Open Humanities Press, Open Book Publishers, National Academies Press, fellow Australians ANU…