The June 28 Chronicle of Higher Education has a debate on the question whether university presses are endangered. Malcolm Litchfield argues that they threatened by (1) their own drift toward commercial publishing and (2) library experiments with digital publishing. Niko Pfund argues that they are not threatened, and in fact are assured survival precisely because they straddle the academic and commercial worlds.
In his piece, Litchfield also proposes a kind of institutional eprints archive to replace much of the function of a university press, though he needlessly complicates it by suggesting that faculty transfer to their institution non-exclusive electronic rights to publish their academic writings. He also suggests that retroactive peer review could replace and improve upon the current system of prospective peer review. (I've often argued in FOSN that retroactive peer review can reduce the cost and shorten the delay of scholarly publication.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/26/2002 10:12:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
