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Officials at Oxford University Press (OUP) say their Oxford Scholarship Online program (OSO), a digital database of the press’s monographs, will expand by September to include nearly all of its monograph titles. OUP vice president and publisher Niko Pfund said that the successful program, will add new “modules” in math, physics, biology, psychology, business/management, history, literature, classics, and linguistics, adding nine new disciplines in all to the original four “modules” (economics, politics, religion, and philosophy). “This will in effect double the number of new titles we’re putting into OSO to approximately 400-450 new books a year,” he told the LJ Academic Newswire.

Pfund said the bold effort to launch OSO has taken “thousands” of hours of effort between publishers and authors and “lots” of m taoney, though he declined to estimate theb. OSO launched in 2003 as a subscription database before switching to a “perpetual access” model in 2005. The press’ massive effort, Pfund says, is paying off, with usage up over 450 percent. Pfund said OUP may even add more of its mainstream books to OSO, titles not necessarily considered monographs. “One of the challenges of academic publishing is the different way in which scholars, librarians, and publishers define the term ‘monograph,’” he conceded. “But one of the animating principles behind OSO is to maximize exposure for our books. So, if we think that inclusion of a specific academic trade or trade title in OSO would make for a good fit in the site, we’d include it.”

Of course, inclusion in OSO depends on a host of other factors as well, including the wishes of authors, some of whom may fear that an online offering will diminish book sales. In an age when Google is roiling the marketplace with its scan plan, prompting lawsuits and forcing many presses and authors into sometimes uncomfortable choices, OSO represents a significant strategic commitment of resources by OUP. And so far, authors have enthusiastically embraced the venture. “I’d say 90-95 percent of authors are initially positive, with about 20-25 percent having substantive questions that involve a few rounds of conversation,” Pfund said. Only “a very few” authors have declined inclusion. “In fact,” he added, “it’s been inspirational to see how many are willing to put in extra work on drafting abstracts and keyword lists to ensure their work is not only included in OSO but well-represented.”

It’s difficult to judge whether OSO has had an effect on book sales, Pfund said, noting that overall monograph sales have not decreased since OSO launched and some titles may appear to have benefited from increased exposure. But focusing on book sales, he suggests, is simply too narrow a measure in today’s “fragmented,” increasingly digital world. “We’re not seeing the end of the book, we’re seeing the galloping diversification of how its message can be conveyed,” he explains, describing the press’ philosophy as “format agnosticism,” that is to deliver content in whatever format is desired. “If dissemination and influence is our primary currency, then having books available via OSO, or netlibrary, in print perpetuity via print-on-demand, or in Google Book Search and Amazon’s Search Inside the Book means that more people can access your work in more ways from more places than ever before. That does translate to dollars.”

Library Journal Academic Newswire, Feb. 1, 2007

With its latest venture, the University of Michigan Press is exploring the cutting edge, both in terms of the content it publishes and how it publishes. Under a new collaborative program between the press, the library, and the Scholarly Publishing Office, the UM Press’s new Digital Culture imprint will both sell books and offer the full-text of those books freely on its Digital Culture Books website. The imprint debuted with the fall 2006 publication of The Best of Technology Writing 2006, edited by journalist and Sunday New York Times business columnist Brendan Koerner, who with UM press editor Alison MacKeen selected 24 pieces from several hundred submissions. “We wanted a versatile mixture of the light-hearted and serious, profiles, features, and ‘big think’ pieces,” MacKeen said of the first volume. “We also wanted to embed some articles in there that would help to make people aware of undercovered issues such as digital copyright, municipal wireless, and so on,” A 2007 volume, to be edited by Newsweek’s Steven Levy, is currently accepting nominations.

As groundbreaking as some of the ideas, however, is the Press’s decision to practice what many of its authors now preach, using the Digital Culture imprint to develop an “open and participatory publishing model” that seeks to “build a community” around its content. “Our goal is to give each project a robust online and print presence and to use the effort not only to introduce scholars to a range of publishing choices but also to collect data about how consumption habits vary on the basis of genre, age, discipline,” MacKeen explained. “The data will help us to understand more about the economics of digital publishing, and will also, we think, offset any potential economic risks by developing the venture as a research opportunity.”

While press officials use the term “open access,” the venture is actually more “free access” than open at this stage. Open access typically does not require permission for reuse, only a proper attribution. UM director Phil Pochoda told the LJ Academic Newswire that, while no final decision has been made, the press’s “inclination is to ask authors to request the most restrictive Creative Commons license” for their projects. That license, he noted, requires attribution and would not permit commercial use, such as using it in a subsequent for-sale product, without permission. The Digital Culture Books web site currently reads that “permission must be received for any subsequent distribution.”

The initiative is an innovative publishing strategy for university presses, who have the increasingly complex mission of serving scholarly communication needs while staying financially viable. “It will be interesting to see how it will go in terms of book sales,” MacKeen concedes. “I can imagine either an increase or a decrease.” Pochoda stressed that there is “more than a business model at stake,” however, noting that the collaborative nature of the Digital Culture imprint represents the press’ chance “to support open access in principle and practice while still acknowledging the obligation to survive as a business operation.” Nevertheless, he has reason to believe the press will sell some books. The National Academy Press, for example, offers its book content online, Pochoda notes, and its data suggests a corresponding jump in sales.

Library Journal Academic Newswire, Jan. 11, 2007

Scholarpedia feels and looks like Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Indeed, both are powered by the same program - MediaWiki. Both allow visitors to review and modify articles simply by clicking on the edit this article link.
However, Scholarpedia differs from Wikipedia in some very important ways:
• Each article is written by an expert (invited or elected by the public).
• Each article is anonymously peer reviewed to ensure accurate and reliable information.
• Each article has a curator - typically its author — who is responsible for its content.
• Any modification of the article needs to be approved by the curator before it appears in the final, approved version.

…Currently, Scholarpedia hosts Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience, Encyclopedia of Dynamical Systems and Encyclopedia of Computational Intelligence. Although all three will eventually be published in a printed form, they will also remain freely available and modifiable online. (Producing a hard copy of each encyclopedia is important for archiving; besides, many academicians have a preconception that the prestige of an online article is not as high as that of a printed one.)

If there is enough interest and support from the public, Scholarpedia will grow in the following directions:
• The neuroscience chapter of Encyclopedia of Computational Neuroscience will be a seed to start Encyclopedia of Cognitive Neuroscience, and then Encyclopedia of Neuroscience
• Encyclopedia of Dynamical Systems will be a seed to start Encyclopedia of Applied Mathematics, and then Encyclopedia of Mathematics.
• Encyclopedia of Computational Intelligence will be a seed to start Encyclopedia of Computer Science.

Read more at Scholarpedia

Last Wednesday, Michael Wesch was one of thousands of Internet users to add material to the video-sharing site YouTube. He posted a five-minute clip, set to techno music, that helps explain Web 2.0 — the so-called second wave of Web-based services that enables people to network and aggregate information online.

The next morning, Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, sent the link to 10 colleagues and friends. It was a second draft. He mostly wanted their feedback. And they responded positively by forwarding the link to a few of their friends. Within hours, the video had more than 100 hits on YouTube.

“I was elated,” Wesch said. “By that time I was already satisfied that I generated a viral video.”

Eventually, a popular blogger discovered the video and posted it onto his site, which helped send the hits into the thousands. Scores of people saw the clip through the Internet blog search engine Technorati, and a number of them promoted it to the front page of the news aggregate site digg. By then, the blogosphere was all over Wesch’s project, and some were calling it a must-see video for anyone wanting to understand the hottest features of the Web.

The video page had been viewed 19,000 times by early Monday, 30,000 times by the afternoon and 91,000 times by early Tuesday.

Wesch’s experience of quick Web exposure is hardly rare in an age of hyperlinks, blogs and constant content sharing. And it has helped illustrate the power of Web 2.0 to his class on “digital ethnography.” Students, who have been discussing what makes a video popular on sites such as YouTube, viewed the video on Thursday, before it became an Internet hit. Wesch said the class is researching the social and cultural phenomena of the Internet and how the technology has spawned new language (HTML-speak, for instance).

Read the full article: http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/02/07/web

Inside Higher Ed News, Feb. 7, 2007

Michael Wesch graduated from the Kansas State’s undergraduate anthropology program 10 years ago, received his doctorate from the University of Virginia and returned to Kansas State as a faculty member in 2004. He said he created his first Web page in 1998 and has been looking at ways of presenting ethnographies in a more visual way. (Much of his research has focused on cultural practices in Papua New Guinea.)

As part of an article on Web 2.0 that is intended to appear in a journal of anthropology, Wesch created the video to appear on the publication’s Web site.

“I was trying to explain this stuff in the traditional paper format, and I thought, ‘This is ironic,’” he said. “I can illustrate this much better in a video.”

The difference between HTML and XML, the formation of blogs and the nonlinear quality of digital text are topics addressed in Wesch’s piece. The title, “The Machine is Us/ing Us,” is a reference to a point made in the video — that we are teaching our computer new ideas every time we click on a link. As Wesch says: “The more we are aware of the machine, the better we can make it serve us.”

And as he writes in the video, “Digital text is no longer just linking information. The Web is no longer just linking information. The Web is linking people.”

YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

Along with the revived Rice University Press, which announced last week it would reboot as a digital press after a 10-year hiatus, the Institute for the Future of the Book (IF Book) last week launched MediaCommons a digital initiative in media studies that will seek to pioneer new forms of digital scholarly communication in the humanities. According to IF Book fellow Ben Vershbow, MediaCommons will go beyond editions of digital text to include a “wide-ranging scholarly network” in which media studies professionals can “write, publish, review, and discuss, in forms ranging from the blog to the monograph, from the purely textual to the multi-mediated, with all manner of degrees in between.” There are some similarities to electronic press initiatives, such as Rice UP, Vershbow notes, but also some key differences. “MediaCommons will really be a place more than a press,” Vershbow told the LJ Academic Newswire. The new edition of Rice UP, he observes, is moving to an all-digital model in order to make scholarly materials simultaneously more accessible and less expensive by taking advantage of the benefits of digital publishing. “But the way these materials are submitted, reviewed, and vetted is still quite conventional,” he explained. “MediaCommons, on the other hand, is much more about foregrounding that interaction.”

Vershbow says MediaCommons represents a “shift from thinking about an ‘electronic press’ to thinking about a ’scholarly network,’” in an effort to reinvigorate intellectual discourse. MediaCommons seeks to address complaints common to scholarly communication: time-lags before publication, further delays in reviews or responses, a hidden peer-review system, and, of course, “increasing economic difficulties threatening many university presses and libraries.” Eventually, MediaCommons will seek to produce “concrete scholarly products,” Vershbow said. But more importantly, the project seeks to reform the process of scholarship. “This is why we are calling it a scholarly network and not a press,” he says. “In MediaCommons, a scholarly work does not have to wait for an invisible review process to conclude in order for its public life to begin. Rather it begins as soon as it submitted.”

The point, Vershbow says, is to make “visible the conversations between scholars and to forge new conversations with the public, and, moreover, to make the products of both conversations universally accessible, and fully plugged into the mutli-mediated, networked modes of contemporary intellectual life.” Why Media Studies for this initiative? Vershbow says there is a natural affinity between the field and the process of publication. “On the intellectual side, scholars in media studies explore the very tools that a network such as the one we’re proposing will use,” he explained. “We’re convinced that media studies scholars will need to lead the way in convincing tenure and promotion committees that new modes of publishing like this network are not simply valid but important. We hope that media studies will provide a key point of entry for a broader reshaping of publishing in the humanities.”

Library Journal Academic Newswire, July 27, 2006

Since its launch in 1999, the HEB has been making steady progress pioneering the digital future of the history monograph and, this week, American Council of Learned Society’s History E-Book Project (HEB) and Rutgers University Press (RUP) announced the “cooperative publication” of two innovative electronic titles that offer strong examples into the power of technology to expand traditional scholarly monographs. Through HEB, Rutgers has issued e-versions, compete with sound and video, of Fred Nadis’ Wonder Shows: Science, Religion, and Magic on the American Stage, and Krystyn Moon’s Yellowface: Creating the Chinese in American Popular Music, 1850s-1920s. HEB project directors Eileen Gardiner and Ron Musto said the books represent a “breakthrough,” and demonstrate how “a university press, working collaboratively can incorporate even the most robust electronic features into a standard and predictable workflow.”

That collaboration involved not only staff at Rutgers but also the Scholarly Publishing Office at the University of Michigan Library, which collaborated on the R&D for these titles. Of note, Nadis’ book incorporates several short films, while Moon’s uses a series of complete musical performances that accompany the sheet music and analysis. Both titles include standard HEB features such as complete cross-searchability, XML text and annotation, enhanced image handling, related historiography, and online reviews that create an interoperable network of scholarship and its analysis. “Readers can now experience our books with imaginative and captivating enhancements we once never thought possible,” said RUP director Marlie Wasserman. The History E-Book Project, which launched in September 2002, adds approximately 250 books annually to its collection. ACLS collaborates in this initiative with eight Learned Societies and nearly 75 university presses, funded initially by a $3-million, five-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional funding from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. The Project achieved self-sustainability in the spring of 2005.

Library Journal Academic Newswire, July 27, 2006

Excerpt:
Many academics have expressed skepticism, right here on Wired Campus blog, about the validity of Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit. But some researchers are taking an approach more along the lines of: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

The Institute for the Future of the Book, a center supported by the University of Southern California, announced today that it will soon unveil an online scholarly press, of sorts, called MediaCommons, that will focus on the discipline of media studies. The announcement comes just days after Rice University unveiled the first all-digital university press.

MediaCommons will try a variety of new ideas to shake up scholarly publishing. One of them is essentially a mini-Wikipedia about aspects of the discipline. Or, as the announcement states, “electronic reference works, in which a community collectively produces, in a mode analogous to current wiki projects, authoritative resources for research in the field.”

Visit: http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=1419

By Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education: The Wired Campus, July 17, 2006

Established in January 2004, Cornell University’s Internet-First University Press is described as follows:

These materials are being published as part of a new approach to scholarly publishing. The manuscripts and videos are freely available from this Internet-First University Press repository within DSpace at Cornell University.

These online materials are available on an open access basis, without fees or restrictions on personal use. All mass reproduction, even for educational or not-for-profit use, requires permission and license.

There are Internet-First University Press DSpace collections for books and articles, multimedia and videos, and undergraduate scholarly publications. There is a print-on-demand option for books and articles.

There are DSpace sub-communities for journals and symposia, workshops, and conferences. One e-journal is published by Internet-First University Press, the CIGR E-Journal (most current volume dated 2005). A print journal, Engineering Quarterly, has been digitized and made available.

There appears to be no further information about the Internet-First University Press at its DSpace site; however, the “Internet-First Publishing Project at Cornell Offers New and Old Books Free Online or to Be Printed on Demand” press release provides further background information.

ARL Institutional Repositories SPEC Kit, Aug. 23, 2006

Cornell’s Internet-First University Press web site:
http://dspace.library.cornell.edu/handle/1813/62

Information gathered from:
DigitalKoans, http://www.escholarlypub.com/digitalkoans/2006/08/23/digital-universitylibrary-presses-part-5-internet-first-university-press/