Publishing Without Exclusive Rights

Journal publishers don’t need exclusive rights. Or, they don’t need them for publishing. They don’t need them to make a work public or to add value in the form of peer review, copy editing, metadata, formatting, discoverability, or preservation. Nor do they need them to make enough money to pay their bills and grow. Publishers only need exclusive rights for monopoly control over the published work and any revenue it might yield. Publishers who say they need exclusive rights are saying they need this monopoly control. The best evidence that journal publishers don’t need exclusive rights is that so many peer-reviewed journals do without them, for example, open access journals using CC-BY. 

The Miracle Year: Summer and Fall

This chapter focuses on Ray Bradbury's phenomenal year as a writer during the summer and fall of 1950. A chance meeting with Christopher Isherwood at a Los Angeles bookstore in early July 1950 provided the critical breakthrough that Bradbury needed to bring The Martian Chronicles more fully into mainstream literary appreciation. The timing of Bradbury's review copy gift could not have been better; Isherwood had just agreed to write extended book reviews for Tomorrow, a new literary magazine. Isherwood's review of the Chronicles appeared in the October 1950 issue of Tomorrow. This chapter first considers the impact of Isherwood's friendship on Bradbury's career before turning to Bradbury's new “Illustrated Man” concept for Doubleday and his creation of a 100-page typescript titled Long after Midnight. It also discusses Bradbury's deal with Bantam for an anthology of new fantasy and science fiction stories.

Sidney E. Berger. Rare Books and Special Collections. Chicago: Neal-Schuman, 2014. xxii, 537p. ISBN 9781555709648. $129

When a review copy arrived in my mailbox,1 my first thought was, “Heavens, a monster!” Rescued from its wrappings, this proved accurate: 8½×11 inches, the book is 1⅛ inches thick, weighs 2.8 pounds on my kitchen scale, perfect-bound in wrappers. It is not a tome that invites a cuddle. It is, in fact, too heavy to hold while reading more than a page or two.The main text is double-column with headings in bold. Less formal comments on the main text, drawn from Berger's work experience as department head, student, teacher, writer, printer, and collector, are in grayed balloons scattered . . .

Sizing Up Winter by L. Flatt

Flatt, Lizann. Sizing Up Winter. Illus. Ashley Barron. Toronto, ON: Owlkids, 2013. Print.Children’s book author, Lizann Flatt, is a freelance editor and writer of children’s fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Ms Flatt has enjoyed a longstanding relationship with Owl, beginning as a teen in 1981, when she won a writing contest and was published in Owl Magazine. Lizann went on to contribute in content development and editorial positions during and following her Arts degree.Hailing originally from Whitby, Ontario, Toronto-based illustrator, Ashley Barron is passionate about nature, and this comes through in her cut-paper collages. Ms Barron’s skillful use of simple shapes, choice of colour and texture, and attention to detail, result in visually stunning cut-paper collage works, which are a central feature in Sizing up Winter, as well as the other books in the same series.Sizing up Winter is the third book in the Math in Nature series, which includes “Counting on Fall”, “Sorting through Spring”. This book pairs rhyming text with colourful nature-inspired artwork to introduce young readers to measurement concepts such as depth, distance, size, area, and time. Highlight boxes on each page ask questions that encourage readers to examine the images closely, encouraging interactive reading.Many of the pages use rhyming text, but this approach is used inconsistently. Some words and concepts may not be clear to young readers (e.g., mass, capacity) a glossary or call-out boxes on the same page as the introduced terms would have been helpful. The back of the book includes Nature Notes with additional information about the animals featured in the pages of the book, in the order in which the animals appear, rather than in alphabetical order.The online Teacher’s Guide resource, a pdf that includes support activities to reinforce measurement concepts from each page of the book, is a valuable addition to the book: http://www.owlkidsbooks.com/ResourcesActivities/TeacherGuides.aspx or http://www.owlkidsbooks.com/Portals/0/docs/teachersGuides/SizingUpWinter-TeacherGuides.pdf (pdf document). It’s unfortunate that the book itself does not mention its availability (I only learned about it from a publisher promotional insert in the review copy of the book).“Shaping up Summer”, a fourth book in the Math in Nature series will be released in Spring 2014.Recommended: 3 out of 4 starsReviewer: Maria TanMaria is a library intern at the University of Alberta’s John W. Scott Health Sciences Library. She enjoys travelling and visiting unique and far-flung libraries. Maria firmly believes that children's literature is an essential component in the fountain of youth.

Aaron D. Purcell. Academic Archives: Managing the Next Generation of College and University Archives, Records, and Special Collections. Chicago: Neal-Schuman, 2012. xx, 314p. $95 (ISBN 978-1555707699).

This title first attracted my attention when mentioned in the April issue of American Libraries. The mention was only a sentence, but, as it expanded on the title, I read it to herald a gutsy author willing to profile the emerging academy, predict the records it will produce, and outline a scheme (or schemes) to manage them. I was disabused when the review copy arrived. Mr. Purcell acknowledges that colleges and universities face challenges today but offers no particular insight as to where the sector is headed—up, down, or out. Economics and digitization, it seems, may force cosmetic change . . .

Comments on Victor Lieberman, Strange Parallels

In the presence of such a powerhouse lineup of Asianists I think I will tiptoe off to the other end of Lieberman's Eurasia and presume on my unique qualifications in this company as having published over twenty pages for the general reader on the France of Louis XIV and fifteen on the Russia of Peter the Great. Also, I have a bee in my bonnet at the moment about how the world changed between 1770 and 1830, and will have most to say about what Lieberman offers on that period. I owe Jerry Bentley a review article on all this for the Journal of World History, because he got me a review copy of the large work of Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. I also got hooked by listening in on a fine conference at the Clark Library in Los Angeles in 2008, which led to The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, edited by David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. A less recent book which I think is an under-appreciated breakthrough for this effort is Chris Bayly's Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830.

Is Wikipedia for Scientists?

Participation in a social network can have it's perks. Thanks to the O'Reilly Group on Facebook (that other social network), I received a review copy of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual. But why would a scientist want to know how to write and edit articles ...