Content Tagged Book Channel Cross Post

Hilde van Zeeland and Juan Castro write about new AI-powered writing assistants for scientific and academic writing:

"Language as a Barrier to Publishing?" Research Information, October/November 2021, p.24-25, https://content.yudu.com/web/tzly/0A449ow/ROoct21/html/index.html?page=26&origin=reader

De Gruyter has announced the 10 winning titles that will be published in open access without any author publication charges (APCs) as part of the celebration of its 10 year anniversary of OA book publishing. You will find the list here:

"10 years of Open Access Books at De Gruyter – 10 Winning Titles" (DeGruyter Conversations, September 22, 2021)

Emma DiPasquale writes about the University of Michigan Library's move to an open access monographs program:

"A partnership led by the Latin Americanist Research Resources Project (LARRP) in collaboration with the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO), JSTOR, and Latin American bookseller García Cambeiro has expanded a sustainable Open Access pilot (Publish as Open) for monographs developed and supported by the library community. This is the second phase of a project to expand Latin American OA ebooks accessible through Books at JSTOR and to explore further opportunities for developing this model with other university presses."

" Central European University Press in partnership with the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM), and in collaboration with early supporters of the Opening the Future library membership programme, has reached the threshold needed to begin funding its first titles in open access....

"Knowledge Unlatched (KU), the international initiative for Open Access (OA), is pleased to announce the launch of the eighth round of funding today... KU is continuing the thematic approach to pledging in 2021, which means pledging libraries can select the appropriate collections based on their preferred subject areas (e.g., History, Politics, Communications, Linguistics, STEM)."

"The MIT Press has announced the launch of Direct to Open

Knowledge Unlatched has released "short but informative videos" that "feature a publisher describing the partnership it has developed with KU in order to unlatch quality scholarly books in various disciplines over the next few years."

Source: Mirela Roncevic, No Shelf Required, November 27, 2020, http://www.noshelfrequired.com/knowledge-unlatched-releases-short-videos-on-the-relevance-...

Dr. Frances Pinter, Executive Chair for the Central European University Press, reflects on the impact of the pandemic on library budgets and modes of operation:

"...we can use this crisis to mark a commitment to reducing costs while improving dissemination of these specialist monographs that provide the foundational basis for development in the HSS [Humanities and Social Sciences] subjects.

"In line with international movements towards making academic content Open Access (OA), both for journals and books, and in keeping with our mission to disseminate quality scholarship widely, CEU Press is launching a new partnership programme with research libraries worldwide. The Opening the Future project is a membership scheme for libraries who can participate either from their OA funds or their acquisitions budgets."

"Under the headline "10 Topics, 10 Books, 10 Weeks", De Gruyter celebrates its 10th open access book anniversary and invites scientists and scholars globally to submit their book projects for OA publication. The 10 winning titles will be published in 2021 by De Gruyter in OA without any author publication fees to support the development of open research."

In the Scholarly Kitchen,  Seth Denbo, Director of Scholarly Communication and Digital Initiatives at the American Historical Association, assesses the state of open peer review in the humanities:

"Open Peer Review in the Humanities," The Scholarly Kitchen, March 4, 2020, https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2020/03/04/guest-post-open-peer-review-in-the-humanities/

In October 2019, the Royal Historical Historical Society (RHS) released a “guidance paper” on “Plan S and the History Journal Landscape.”

"Open Access (OA) content on one seamless and easy-to-use platform: that is the goal of the Open Research Library (ORL), which has officially launched ... at www.openresearchlibrary.org...  A powerful hosting platform that makes scientific book publications, and other high-quality academic OA content, freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world, ORL provides free access to a comprehensive collection of thousands of scholarly monographs, anthologies, journals, videos, posters and other formats. "

Rick Anderson (Associate Dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication in the J. Willard Marriott Library of the University of Utah) and Karin Wulf (Executive Director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture) discuss the recent report on scholars' perceptions and use of monographs by Cambridge University Press (CUP) and Oxford University Press (OUP).

Victoria Addis, " Academic Book Reviews Deserve Some Respect," Inside Higher Ed, October 3, 2019, https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2019/10/03/why-reviewing-books-good-avenue-scholarly...

What’s the future of the scholarly monograph? Oxford and Cambridge University Presses announced the results of their joint global survey on that question Tuesday. The survey, which was open to researchers in the humanities and social sciences and attracted 5,000 responses, found that the monograph complemented the journal article and remains a "core medium for the dissemination and debate of new research and can define areas of study for decades."

The “Mind the Gap” report  "describes the wide range of open-source publishing tools available for academic books and journals."

Source: Lindsay McKenzie, "Mapping the Open Source Publishing Landscape," Inside Higher Ed, August 8, 2019, https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2019/08/08/mapping-open-source-publishing-landscape

" Digital Science has offered its own useful assessment of what is happening in this realm via a new Digital Science Report, entitled The State of Open Access Monographs. The report establishes a benchmark for the information community in what is and is not going well."

Article of interest:

James Kessenides, "The Digital Monograph and Primary Source Databases: Agenda Toward a Unified Conversation," Proceedings of the Charleston Library Conference (2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.5703/1288284316705

"Thanks to the expiration of the so-called "Micky Mouse Protection Act," the U.S. Copyright Office will release a year’s worth of art, literature, scholarship, photography, film, etc.

Article of interest:

Tennant JP, Dugan JM, Graziotin D et al. A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review. F1000Research 2017, 6:1151 (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.12037.3)

This article seeks to understand information behavior in the context of the academic e-book user experience, shaped by a disparate set of vendor platforms licensed by libraries.

An interesting post by Mark Edington, "founding director of the Amherst College Press and the publisher of Lever Press, two initiatives to build a pathway for peer-reviewed, digitally native scholarship from a liberal arts perspective through a platinum open access model."

Samuel Cohen, an  associate professor of English at the University of Missouri, writes about the challenges of scholarly publishing in the Chronicle of Higher Education (April 22, 2018): "When university presses close, so do our minds."

"[University College of London Press], the University of Michigan Press, the University of California Press and Cornell University Press recently collaborated with Knowledge Unlatched Research to look at how people who downloaded OA books from the digital library JSTOR used them... Most of the OA books reviewed in the study were in the social sciences..."

Charles Watkinson writes about Fulcrum, the University of Michigan Press's new reading platform. Newly launched is "A Mid-Republican House from Gabii ...an archaeological site report with a difference. Not only can users access all the associated data from the excavated building, but they can explore it through an interactive 3D model as well as a narrative text."

New article of interest about ScholarlyHub:

April Hathcock and Guy Geltner, "Clearing the Garden: ScholarlyHub as a New Non-profit Digital Commons, Insights, 31 no. 6 (2018). DOI: http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.398 https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.398/

"Cornell Open is the new global open access portal for classic out-of-print titles from the distinguished catalog of  Cornell University Press. Funded by the newly created Humanities Open Book Program, a collaborative effort between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Cornell Open offers for the first time open access to key titles in literary criticism and theory, German studies, and Slavic studies."

KU Research (Knowledge Unlatched) has released a study of Open Access ebook usage on JSTOR.

"Among the findings are that the JSTOR platform accounts for the largest number of referrals to the Open Access ebooks; 34.1% of readers are already on the platform when they access the OA books. Institutions located in the Global South are relatively high users of OA books made available via the JSTOR platform when compared to institutions located in the US, UK, and Western Europe."

Wayne State University Press "has digitized a selection of backlist titles for Open Access distribution... Titles selected for the project fall into several sub-topics that reflect current programs: industrial and labor history, maritime history, Detroit history, Jewish history, Holocaust studies, Israel and Middle East studies, and biographies of significant individuals."

To view the list, visit Wayne Open.

MIT Press has joined forces with the Internet Archive (IA) to scan, preserve, and enable lending of hundreds of the press’s books that are currently unavailable in digital form. With support from British funding agency Arcadia, IA will scan a selection of MIT Press’s backlist titles, which will then be available for any library that owns a physical copy of each book to lend or make openly available, and will also be accessible through IA’s archive.org.

Trevor Owens has posted on his blog the draft of his forthcoming book, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation: An Introduction (to be published by Johns Hopkins University Press). 

See the introduction and conclusion, and the table of contents.

No Shelf Required has a series of  Free Content Alerts, which highlights sites and platforms where ebooks and econtent may be downloaded and read for free. So far they have recommended 10 great sites for "anyone looking for quality content online in digital format".

See Ten sites that give free access to quality ebooks librarians and publishers should know about [readers, too]

"The March 2017 issue of Perspectives on History featured a piece by Seth Denbo, the AHA’s director of scholarly communication and digital initiatives, on the trend of open-access monographs in humanities fields....

An analysis of the evolution of the Google Book project and its current state:

Scott Rosenberg, "How Google Book Search Got Lost," Backchannel, April 11, 2017, https://backchannel.com/how-google-book-search-got-lost-c2d2cf77121d

Lee Skallerup Bessette briefly reviews a book,  Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science, edited by Rajiv Jhangiani and Robert Biswas-Diener (Ubiquity Press, 2017)

No Shelf Required, the "portal on all things ebooks and digital content," has a new feature on free ebooks. Every Friday, a source of free ebooks online is reviewed.

Source: "Introducing Free Books Alert, a new feature on No Shelf Required", No Shelf Required, January 27, 2017, http://www.noshelfrequired.com/introducing-free-books-alert-a-new-feature-on-nsr/

Alison Muddit writes: "I’m happy to present a selection of our favorite university press reads of 2016 (and thanks to one of our commenters for the suggestion!). We tend to think of university presses as focused primarily on humanities and social science (dare I say esoteric?) monographs and to be sure, a critical part of our mission is to support scholarship from less-funded, smaller and emerging fields.

New book of interest:

Anne Trubek, The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016)

The book was reviewed by Richard Cox in his blog, Reading Archives and the Academy.

23 university presses that are part of, or report directly to, university libraries met to discuss the benefits and challenges of that arrangement during the P2L Summit and just released a white paper containing recommendations on how to libraries and university presses could collaborate:

The University of Michigan Press/Michigan Publishing announced "the initial beta launch of its Fulcrum publishing platform. In its beta phase, Fulcrum is focused on the presentation of digital source and supplemental materials that cannot be represented adequately in print form. Fulcrum allows for a richer experience and deeper understanding for the reader and enables authors to make better, multi-faceted arguments."

JSTOR has announced a new program to make Open Access monographs available on the JSTOR platform. 63 titles areavailable from the University of California Press, University of Michigan Press, UCL Press, and Cornell University Press. Several hundred more will be added in the next year.

The full list of books, which includes several history books, is available at http://about.jstor.org/open-access?cid=eml_jb_OA_10_2016_ACRL

New book of interest:

Eric T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder,  Knowledge Machines Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities (MIT Press, 2016), https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/knowledge-machines

This book is not about digital history but can be of interest to historians:

Kent Anderson reflects on a session at the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers 2016 meeting:

"[the moderator] delineated four main roles — an important word here, “role” — academics and researchers assume at different points across the various aspects of publishing. These roles are reader, author, reviewer, and editorial board member ...

... It is clearly impossible to satisfy every constituent role and expectation — a true no-win situation."

The New Librarianship Field Guide (MIT, 2016) -- "In concise chapters, Lankes addresses the mission of libraries and explains what constitutes a library. He offers practical advice for librarian training; provides teaching notes for each chapter; and answers “Frequently Argued Questions” about the new librarianship."

Boook of interest:

Elena Pierazzo, Digital Scholarly Editing. Theories, Models and Methods. Routledge, 2015.

Book of interest, freely available for download:

Roberto Simanowski, ed. Digital Humanities and Digital Media: Conversations on Politics, Culture, Aesthetics and Literacy (Open Humanities Press, 2016). http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/digital-humanities-and-digital-media/

From the book presentation:

In Inside Higher Ed (July 26, 2016) Barbara Fister reviews David Lewis's Reimagining the Academic Library (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016).

David Lewis also presented his ideas in an ACRL webinar.

Second issue of the newsletter Oh, the Humanities.  A publication of ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) and its parent organization, The American Council of Learned Societies.  Read it here.

New book of interest:

Thomas Cauvin, Public History: A Textbook of Practice (Routledge, 2016)

Gabriele Griffin and Matt Hayler, eds. Research Methods for Reading Digital Data in the Digital Humanities  (Edinburgh University Press, 2016)

Digital monograph of interest:

Nicholas Bauch, Enchanting the Desert: A Pattern Language for the Production of Space (Stanford University Press, 2016)

From the work's introduction:

A new publication in the Charleston Insights in Library, Archival, and Information Sciences series published by Purdue University Press:

Jeff Sharpe, of the Internet Archive's Midwest Regional Digitization Center, writes about the history of books they digitize:

29 February 2016 Rick Anderson posted "A Possible Game-Changer for Open Educational Resources?' on the Scholarly Kitchen.  The post begins: "Earlier this month, an EdWeek Market Brief reported that Amazon is preparing to beta-test a platform for open educational resources (OER) — textbooks and other classroom instructional materials that are provided online at no charge to users.

Frederick W. Gibbs discusses the implications of data analysis and visualizations in The American Historian (no 7, February 2016):

Article of interest:

Michael S. Seadle , (2016) "Managing and Mining Historical Research Data", Library Hi Tech, Vol. 34 Iss: 1

Purpose

To review how historical research data is managed and mined today.

Design/methodology/approach

The methodology builds on observations over the last decade.

Findings

Posted again to appear in The H-Net Book Channel. A quick scan of the Web discovered the following; perhaps they complement the excellent Art of the Review podcasts http://networks.h-net.org/node/84048/pages/88574/the-art-of-the-review .  If you have others to offer, please send them along.

How to Write a History Book Review – University of Iowa

Readers of historical fiction may find a list  published on the journal Booklist’s (American Library Association) Website useful.  See also Goodreads’ Historical Fiction 2015.

See also the Wikipedia entry National Book Critics Circle Award.