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.
Joihn Sherer assesses the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot (SHMP), " an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation–funded initiative to publish open digital editions of high-quality books from university presses in the field of history":
Making OA Monographs More Discoverable, Usable, and Sustainable, Longleaf Services, August 12, 2020
"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."
October 22, 2020 @ 10:00 am - 3:00 pm
The 2020 TOME Stakeholders Meeting will be held virtually (via Zoom) on Thursday, October 22, and is open to the public. The program includes two sessions:
"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."
"Knowledge Unlatched (KU), the international initiative for Open Access (OA), is pleased to announce the launch of the seventh round of funding today. It includes the KU Select Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) collection of books familiar to libraries, as well as nearly 20 discipline-specific collections developed in partnerships with highly regarded HSS and STEM academic publishers..."
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/
New book of interest:
Jennifer Edmond (ed.) Digital Technology and the Practices of Humanities Research. Open Book Publishers (January 2020)
294 pp. | 2 B&W illustrations | 6.14'' x 9.21'' (156 x 234 mm)
https://openbookpublishers.com/product/1108
In October 2019, the Royal Historical Historical Society (RHS) released a “guidance paper” on “Plan S and the History Journal Landscape.”
"In 2019, KU continued to expand its KU Select offerings in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) as well as in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). It also introduced new partnerships and business models with some of the world’s most renowned academic publishers. As a result, KU will be able to unlatch 274 books from its KU Select 2019 HSS collection, 38 books from its KU Select STEM collection, and about 98 books from its various partner offerings... "
"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. "
Karin Wulf writes:
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).
"Could subscriptions create a pathway to sustainable open-access monograph publishing? MIT Press plans to find out."
(Inside Higher Ed, October 22, 2019, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/10/22/exploring-subscriptions-support-open-access...)
Knowledge Unlatched (KU) is rolling out a series of infographics giving insight into how Open Access (OA) books are used around the globe.
(No Shelf Required, Oct. 22, 2019, http://www.noshelfrequired.com/in-celebration-of-international-open-access-week-knowledge-...)
They are an investment in the scholarly community and in ourselves as researchers, Victoria Addis argues:
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...
The MIT Press has received a three-year $850,000 grant from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, to perform a broad-based monograph publishing cost analysis and to develop and openly disseminate a durable financial framework and business plan for open access (OA) monographs.
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."
"A quirk of copyright law means that millions of books are now free for anyone to read, thanks to some work from the New York Public Library.
... One secret of the publishing industry is that most American books published before 1964 never extended their copyright, meaning they’re in the public domain today. "
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
Karin Wulf writes:
" 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."
Knowledge Unlatched announced a new initiative:
This article describes a new open access publishing initiative for history books: the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot .
At the Open Science Barcamp, Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra & Ulrike Wuttke held a session on the following questions:
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
Article of interest:
Abstract:
"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.
In Spring 2018, Altmetric launched Altmetric for Books.
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)
Two leading university presses are changing the way they sell their digital collections to libraries -- cutting out the middlemen. Will others follow suit?
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 Leann Wilson and Marshall Poe on a single online portal for academic books and direct-to-book-consumer models.
Leann Wilson is the co-editor of the New Books Network and Coordinator for Outreach and Social Media at Amherst College Press & Lever Press. Marshall Poe is the founder and editor-in-chief of the New Books Network.
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."
Slides of presentations at the Jisc and Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)'s 12th biannual conference are now available online. The conference on "The changing role for libraries in the context of the research university" took place on July 2, 2018. Presentations included:
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."
Article of interest:
Paul Spence, "The Academic Book and its Digital Dilemmas," Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies (2018). doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856518772029
"[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..."
New book of interest:
Robin Kear and Kate Joranson, eds., Digital Humanities, Libraries, and Partnerships: A Critical Examination of Labor, Networks, and Community
(Chandos Publishing, 2018)
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."
The Developing A Curriculum to Advance Library-Based Publishing project, funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services, is developing curriculum modules that will be part of "a suite of synchronous and asynchronous professional development offerings for librarians." The first two modules are now freely available to professors, workshop instructors, and trainers of all kinds on the pr
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/
"The overwhelming majority of professional staff in research institutions and libraries across the globe view open access as the future of academic and scientific publishing. However, many are not satisfied with the speed of transition, according to a survey by Springer Nature.... The lowest level of satisfaction was on the speed of movement of scholarly books becoming open access in the future."
"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."
Despite slow start, open-access digital scholarship publisher expects to publish first works this year.
Librarians have been talking excitedly about Lever Press, an open-access publisher for digital scholarship led by liberal arts colleges, for several years... The press hired a senior acquisition editor in August and now has several works under contract, pending approval from the press's editorial board.
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."
"Open access looks set to shake up the humanities and social sciences book landscape for the better, reports Rebecca Pool... A little over three years ago, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Library set out to explore what the ‘Academic Book of the Future’ might look like, in the context of open access publishing and the digital revolution."
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.
Another article on the Google Books project, also commenting on how the books are being used:
Jennifer Howard, "What Happened to Google's Effort to Scan Millions of University Library Books?" EdSurge, August 10, 2017, https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-08-10-what-happened-to-google-s-effort-to-scan-millions-...
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.
New book of interest (free PDF download):
Niels Brügger and Ralph Schroeder, eds., The Web As History, UCL Press, 2017, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/browse-books/the-web-as-history
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.
New JSTOR Labs report on the digital monograph:
Reimagining the Digital Monograph: Design Thinking to Build New Tools for Researchers
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".
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) has announced an ebook pilot project "aimed at improving access to a broad selection of open and licensed ebooks through market-based methods. We at DPLA are evaluating what we could potentially do from a community and technology perspective to help libraries maximize patron access to ebooks and other e-content. Through the pilot, set to launch in early fall, DPLA will manage technology solutions for 3-5 large public libraries and consortia."
"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....
Manifold, a hybrid publishing platform created by the U of Minnesota Press and CUNY’s Graduate Center, has launched in beta form with features supporting experimental scholarly work.
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)
Joseph Esposito writes:
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/
JSTOR Labs recently released a project, Reimagining the Monograph, which includes a quick video overview, a prototype (Topicgraph) that uses topic modeling and data visualization to help researchers better evaluate books before they download them, and a white paper.
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:
D'Angelo, B., Jamieson, S., Maid, B. and Walker, J. (Eds) (2016). Information Literacy: Research and Collaboration across Disciplines. Fort Collins, Colorado: The WAC Clearinghouse and University Press of Colorado. http://wac.colostate.edu/books/infolit/
This is a pre-print open access version.
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.
Jill O'Neill writes about the challenges of accessing open access monographs: "In a brief talk at the Charleston Conference this year, I noted that what was needed was a combined stakeholder effort to successfully connect reader and book while making clear the degree of access being offered. "
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:
New publication of interest:
Marinos Ioannides, Eleanor Fink, Antonia Moropoulou, et al., eds., Digital Heritage. Progress in Cultural Heritage: Documentation, Preservation, and Protection - Proceedings of the 6th International Conference, EuroMed 2016, Nicosia, Cyprus, October 31 – November 5, 2016, Proceedings, Part II (Springer, 2016). ISBN: 978-3-319-48973-5 (Print) 978-3-319-48974-2 (Online)
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."
Book of interest to "information professionals in libraries and other cultural heritage institutions who work with digitization projects, cataloguing and classification and information retrieval":
David Stuart, Practical Ontologies for Information Professionals (Facet, 2916), http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/title.php?id=300624#.WAPAZfkrLIU
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
Book of interest to librarians and researchers:
Ed Jones and Michele Seikel, eds., An Essential Guide to Linked Data for Libraries, Archives and Museums (Facet, 2016).
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
Courtney Eathorne writes about Litsy, "a free app that debuted this spring, launched as a bookish take on photo-based social media. It combines Instagram-style photo editing with the informal book reviews found on Goodreads."
This book is not about digital history but can be of interest to historians:
An essay on a new model of open access monograph publishing by the founders of Open Book Publishers:
Rupert Gatti and Marc Mierowsky, "Funding open access monographs: A coalition of libraries and publishers," College and Research Library News 77 no. 9 (Oct. 2016): 456-459, http://crln.acrl.org/content/77/9/456.full
The article discusses the dissemination of books in the humanities and social sciences.
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."
New book of interest:
Jessie Daniels and Polly Thistlethwaite, Being a Scholar in the Digital Era (Policy Press, 2016)
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."
Q& A with the author of a new book that "examines how technology is changing education -- and whether that change is for the better":
Neil Selwyn, Is Technology Good for Education? (Polity Press, 2016).
Boook of interest:
Elena Pierazzo, Digital Scholarly Editing. Theories, Models and Methods. Routledge, 2015.
Also of interest is The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities, which investigates the new skills, competencies, and tools that media historians and scholars need in the era of digital research. It can be downloaded freely.
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:
Interesting discussion about the future of university presses:
"Amid declining book sales, university presses search for new ways to measure success.
...Initiatives such as the publishing service providers at Michigan and UNC are perhaps particularly worth monitoring, as they represent both a shift from publishers being paid for content to being paid for services, and from primarily serving authors outside of the university to also serving faculty members on campus."
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.
Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 "marks the start of a new book series from the University of Minnesota Press. Building on the first edition of Debates in the Digital Humanities, the series will explore the most compelling debates in the field as they emerge.
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.
A new publication: "ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) invites you to the first issue of Oh, the Humanities! Our newsletter for librarians and humanities faculty will feature news, views, pro tips, and the latest developments from HEB and our partner organization, The American Council of Learned Societies."
New book of interest:
Thomas Cauvin, Public History: A Textbook of Practice (Routledge, 2016)
Your network editor has reposted this from H-Announce. The byline reflects the original authorship.
Gabriele Griffin and Matt Hayler, eds. Research Methods for Reading Digital Data in the Digital Humanities (Edinburgh University Press, 2016)
Google Australia has come up with an experimental project called Editions At Play, aimed at exploring the potential of digital books... . Besides the ability to see the locations on Google Street Map, we can switch between two characters’ perspectives on the same situation.
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:
Peter Suber has published an open access book of his essays: Knowledge Unbound: Selected Writings on Open Access, 2002–2011 (MIT Press).
Overview:
A new publication in the Charleston Insights in Library, Archival, and Information Sciences series published by Purdue University Press:
The results of an attempt to answer the above has been reported recently in: How Readers Discover Content in Scholarly Publications by Tracy Gardner and Simon Inger (Published by Renew Training, a trading name of Simon Inger Consulting Ltd, March 2016). Read the full report at: http://www.simoningerconsulting.com/how_readers_discover.html. Findings are succinctly summarized in the Introduction. Ithaka's http://www.ithaka.org Roger C.
Jeff Sharpe, of the Internet Archive's Midwest Regional Digitization Center, writes about the history of books they digitize:
Knowledge Unlatched recently "unlatched" 78 new titles. The books are being loaded onto the OAPEN and HathiTrust platforms, where they will be available for free as fully downloadable PDFs.
Knowledge Unlatched also announced its plans to expand its collections in 2016.
Source: Knowledge Unlatched press releases, March 1 and 11, 2016
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.
Hi All,
There was a recent Slate article that may be of interest as a History teaching resource:
Frederick W. Gibbs discusses the implications of data analysis and visualizations in The American Historian (no 7, February 2016):
NPR: Expensive Journals Drive Academics to Break Copyright Law
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
Your network editor has reposted this from H-Announce. The byline reflects the original authorship.
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
A quick scan of the Web discovered the resources identified below; 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 the 22 January 2016 Reading Archives and the Academy: The Future of the Scholarly Monograph
See also the Wikipedia entry National Book Critics Circle Award.
Nominees for the 2015 awards are available and the awards will be announced March 17, 2016. Learn about them via Book TV and the process and more at the organization's website.
