“Bundle of Sticks” and the Value of Interdependence: Building a Tools and Services Collective

In this article, we raise questions about how bundling and independence show up in the scholarly publishing industry today, both for large conglomerates and for smaller commercial and nonprofit players. We then contemplate what interdependence might look like and how it might help to transform academic publishing. We end with findings from the Next Generation Library Publishing (NGLP) project (2019-2022) and its Collaborative Frameworks Working Group regarding a set of initial steps that we believe publishers, tools, and service providers might take together towards developing a collective publishing framework for open source, values-aligned tools and services.

Audiobooks: Improving Access to and Use of Learning and Teaching Materials for the Print-Disabled

Equal access to books and other educational materials presents equal opportunities for all to acquire education, develop skills, and realise their full potential. Drawing on data gathered through focus group discussions and interviews, our study discusses access and use of books in braille by the print-disabled in special schools/education in Ghana. The study found the supply and access to books in braille by students and teachers inadequate to support teaching and learning, mainly due to the challenges with production. Given the poor access teachers and students have to publications in braille, we argue that audiobooks be adopted as a supplementary reading format for the print-disabled in Ghana so they can have access to equal educational opportunities as their non-disabled colleagues.

Digital Publishing’s Four Challenges

The transition from publishing print on paper to digital publishing on the web presents four challenges that need to be overcome if the full potential the new media is to be reached.

Social justice driving open access publishing: an African perspective

The OA movement isgenerally considered to have been founded for the truly philanthropic purposeof promoting equity and inclusivity in access to scholarship. For Africans,this meant the opening of the research ecosystem to marginalised researchcommunities who could then freely make use of shared research to aid in thesocio-economic development and emancipation of the continent. However, this philanthropicpurpose has been deviated from, leading instead to the disenfranchisement ofthe African research community. Through systemic inequalities embedded in thescholarly ecosystem, the publishing landscape has been northernised, withresearch from the global north sitting at the very top of the knowledgehierarchy to the exclusion of Africa and other parts of the global south. Forthis reason, progressive open access practices and policies need to be adopted,with an emphasis on social justice as an impetus, to enhance the sharing andrecognition of African scholarship, while also bridging the ‘research-exchange’divide that exists between the global south and north. Furthermore, advocatesof open access must collaborate to create equal opportunities for Africanvoices to participate in the scholarly landscape through the creation anddissemination of global south research. Thusly, the continental platform wasdeveloped by University of Cape Town. This platform was developed around theconcept of a tenant model to act as a contributor to social justice driven openaccess advocacy, and as a disruptor of the unjust knowledge hierarchies thatexist. 

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. 

Preserving Innovation: Ensuring the Future of Today’s Scholarship

Scholars are experimenting with increasingly diverse digital technologies to express their research in new ways. Publishers, in turn, are working to support complex, dynamic, born-digital publications that can no longer be represented in print. New forms of scholarship contain enhancements such as embedded media and viewers, data visualizations, different approaches to version management, complex interdependent networks of supporting materials such as software and data, reader-contributed content (annotations, comments), interactive features, and nonlinear forms of navigation. These features can create challenges for the long-term sustainability of the publication – without planning for longevity the most innovative scholarship today may lose the characteristics that make them unique or become expensive to maintain. These challenges are magnified for preservation services that aim to ensure the publications will be available for future scholars. It is in this context that NYU Libraries initiated a project to bring together preservation services that focus on scholarly content with publishers concerned about the long-term survival of their most innovative publications. By analyzing examples of dynamic and enhanced open access monographs, the preservation services determined what could be preserved at scale using current tools. From this the team produced a set of guidelines that those involved in creating and publishing content could use to make these new forms of publications more preservable. The project was also an opportunity to start a conversation between preservation services and publishers about ways to collaborate around the shared goal of perpetuating access to unique and often costly publications.

Always the eBook of the Future

In their third decade, depending on one’s definition, eBooks are still in their incunabula moment. While eBooks began to emerge prior to the year 2000, they began to garner a more robust market after the launch of Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPhone, both in 2007, and Apple’s iPad in 2010. At least by some measures, eBooks today are thriving, and are bound to continue to evolve, just as publishing itself has evolved over more than five centuries. This article examines the current state and potential future of digital publishing, including enhanced eBooks, hypertext, interactivity, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, data- and gesture-based manipulation, and other evolutionary features that transform the eBook into a fundamentally different, immersive experience in reading and engagement.

What has the COVID-19 pandemic taught us about academic book publishing so far? A view from North America

In mid-March 2020 a rash of emergency “lock-down” orders fromState governors confined millions of North American workers to their homes.Students suddenly needed to flip from classroom-based to remote instruction.Scholars in the humanities could no longer get to archives. Movementrestrictions cut off the opportunity to travel for fieldwork and conferenceattendance almost overnight. As publishers and librarians dealt with theravages of COVID-19 on their personal lives and relationships, they alsoembarked on a massive experiment in transforming access to scholarlyinformation. Rather than being a unique benefit only available to members of alibrary subscriber’s “gated community,” access to hundreds of thousands ofbooks and journal articles suddenly became free-to-read globally. That access,of course, had severe limitations. It was temporary (most programs expired atthe end of August 2020), only available to users with an internet connection,and far from comprehensive in its coverage. However, a massive experiment wasstill underway, and the results are proving transformative for publishers andlibraries. So, what did we learn about humanities scholarship and itspublication? This article explores some emerging themes.

Surveillance Publishing

This essay develops the idea of surveillance publishing, with special attention to the example of Elsevier. A scholarly publisher can be defined as a surveillance publisher if it derives a substantial proportion of its revenue from prediction products, fueled by data extracted from researcher behavior. The essay begins by tracing the Google search engine’s roots in bibliometrics, alongside a history of the citation analysis company that became, in 2016, Clarivate. The essay develops the idea of surveillance publishing by engaging with the work of Shoshana Zuboff, Jathan Sadowski, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, and Aziz Huq. The recent history of Elsevier is traced to describe the company’s research-lifecycle data-harvesting strategy, with the aim to develop and sell prediction products to unviersity and other customers. The essay concludes by considering some of the potential costs of surveillance publishing, as other big commercial publishers increasingly enter the predictive-analytics business. It is likely, I argue, that windfall subscription-and-APC profits in Elsevier’s “legacy” publishing business have financed its decade-long acquisition binge in analytics. The products’ purpose, moreover, is to streamline the top-down assessment and evaluation practices that have taken hold in recent decades. A final concern is that scholars will internalize an analytics mindset, one already encouraged by citation counts and impact factors.  

What Are the Characteristics of Canadian Independent, Scholarly Journals? Results from a Website Analysis

The dominance of commercial publishers (Larivière, Haustein, and Mongeon 2015) has led to a discussion in Canada focusing on alternative models for supporting independent, non-commercial, scholarly journals. Although small in number, these journals represent an important contribution to Canadian and global scholarship. They also act as a counterbalance to the increasingly for-profit nature of scholarly publishing. Despite their importance, there exists no definitive list of journals of this nature in Canada, making analysis and understanding of their characteristics difficult.In order to address this gap, the researchers undertook an analysis of the websites of 485 Canadian, independent, scholarly journals. Independent was defined as journals which are not affiliated with a commercial publisher. The researchers gathered data for each journal on their access type (e.g., closed, open access), subject area, size and composition of the editorial team, and any affiliation(s). This data was then analyzed to create a portrait of these journals with these themes. The researchers found that most of these journals were affiliated with at least one organization, with over half being associated with two or more. They also discovered that affiliations varied depending on the discipline and that the size of the editorial team was correlated to the access type. Journals were predominantly in the humanities and social sciences, and the majority were open access (OA) without article processing charges (APCs).While the focus of this study is on Canadian journals, this article provides a framework for other researchers to examine non-commercial, independent publishing in their own countries. Its results also provide preliminary data which may inspire future avenues of research, particularly into models for non-APC, open access journals as well as the editorial board structure and size for independent journals.