NEW MILESTONES
& NEW POTHOLES
Along the Road to Electronic Publishing
by Joel Bradshaw
Journals Manager, UH Press
Abstract
The road to electronic publishing reaches new milestones every few
months, it seems. Reference work publishers are increasingly
abandoning print altogether, and whole libraries are migrating online.
Books and archival documents are now becoming as readily available
as journals in digital formats. And major vendors are moving to make
digital products just as resalable as tangible products have been. But
many potholes old and new litter the road ahead. New gadgetry is
multiplying and connectivity costs keep rising. Publishers are trying
new ways to limit piracy and copyright infringement. Limitations on
“fair-use” are still being debated, and degrees of copyright are
multiplying. And the complexities of the new technologies are
requiring ever more attenuated production lines, with each step
outsourced to different specialists, and massive aggregations of
content dependent on outsourced hosting sites subject to many
unforeseen vulnerabilities.
2012: MUSE & JSTOR add books
“JSTOR & Project MUSE, two of our most heavily used
collections, have both announced that they will be adding ebooks from university presses to their platforms for 2012. As two
of the leading not-for-profit organizations providing full-text
scholarly journal content, their support of university presses
heralds an exciting development for the future of this content.”
— Amelia Brunskil, “JSTOR and Project MUSE announce e-book
content in 2012,” The Full Text: News and Events from DePaul
University Libraries, 3 May 2011
2012: Taxonomy Goes Digital
“Publication of new species names has been a paper-based
process since Carl Linneaus published Species plantarum in 1753
and Systema naturae in 1758. But the year 2012 marks a change
in taxonomy. With its September announcement, the
International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) for the
first time allows publication of online-only taxonomic papers and
follows a similar amendment to the International Code of
Botanical Nomenclature that was announced in July 2011.” —
Peter Burns, “Taxonomy Goes Digital: Nomenclatural Codes
Embrace Online-Only Publication,” FrontMatter 22 (Allen Press)
2012: Dictionary Maker Abandons Print
“Most dictionary publishers haven’t yet gone as far as Macmillan
Education, which announced in November [2012] that it would
no longer make print dictionaries at all. ‘Exiting print is a
moment of liberation, because at last our dictionaries have
found their ideal medium,’ Editor in Chief Michael Rundell said
when the news was announced.” — Jennifer Howard, “In the
Digital Era, Our Dictionaries Read Us,” The Chronicle Review, 11
March 2013
2013: Patents Filed for Digital Resales
“The paperback of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ is exactly like the digital
version except for this: If you hate the paperback, you can give it
away or resell it. If you hate the e-book, you’re stuck with it. The
retailer’s button might say ‘buy now,’ but you are in effect only
renting an e-book — or an iTunes song — and your rights are
severely limited. That has been the bedrock distinction between
physical and electronic works since digital goods became widely
available a decade ago. That distinction is now under attack,
both in the courts and the marketplace, and it could shake up
the already beleaguered book and music industries.” — David
Streitfeld, “Imagining a Swap Meet for E-Books and Music,” New
York Times, 7 March 2013
2013: National Digital Library Launched
“The Digital Public Library of America, to be launched on April
18, is a project to make the holdings of America’s research
libraries, archives, and museums available to all Americans—and
eventually to everyone in the world—online and free of
charge…. [S]everal of the country’s greatest libraries and
museums—among them Harvard, the New York Public Library,
and the Smithsonian—are prepared to make a selection of their
collections available to the public through the DPLA. Those
works will be accessible to everyone online at the launch on
April 18, but they are only the beginning of aggregated offerings
that will grow organically as far as the budget and copyright laws
permit.” — Robert Darton, “The National Digital Public Library is
Launched,” The New York Review of Books, 25 April 2013
2013: National Digital Library (cont.)
“Of course, growth must be sustainable. But the greatest
foundations in the country have expressed sympathy for the
project. Several of them—the Sloan, Arcadia, Knight, and Soros
foundations in addition to the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services—
have financed the first three years of the DPLA’s existence. If a
dozen foundations combined forces, allotting a set amount from
each to an annual budget, they could create the digital
equivalent of the Library of Congress within a decade. And the
sponsors naturally hope that the Library of Congress also will
participate in the DPLA. ” — Robert Darton, “The National Digital
Public Library is Launched,” The New York Review of Books, 25
April 2013
Pothole: Rising Cost of Access
“Since 1990, libraries’ spending on periodicals has increased
three-fold, while their collections have tripled in size through
new acquisitions and through expanded content in existing
holdings. As a result, the average actual cost per journal in 2010
is similar to that of 20-plus years ago…. In 2010, there were 40
million journal articles available digitally, some dating back to the
1800s.” — Paula Gantz, “Digital Licenses Replace Print Prices as
Accurate Reflection of Real Journal Costs,” Professional/Scholarly
Publishing Bulletin, vol. 11, no. 3, Summer/Fall 2012, pp. 1–5
Pothole: Digital Rights Management
“In a move that angered customers and generated waves of
online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of
the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought
them.” — Brad Stone, “Amazon Erases Orwell Books From Kindle
Devices,” New York Times, 17 July 2009
Pothole: Subsidiary Rights
“Today audio book rights and e-book rights are very important
due to the electronic readers such as the Kindle and others and
the ability of listeners to download books to their iPods. Authors
must be sure to keep track of these rights and know, in
publishing agreements, who maintains control of them and who
benefits from their sale.” — Elizabeth House, “A Word about
Subsidiary Rights,” Dorrance Publishing’s AuthorsAdvocate.net, 9
June 2009
Pothole: Copyright
“The main impediment to the DPLA’s growth is legal, not
financial. Copyright laws could exclude everything published
after 1964, most works published after 1923, and some that go
back as far as 1873. Court cases during the last few months have
opened up the possibility that the fair use provision of the
copyright act of 1976 could be extended to make more recent
books available for certain purposes, such as service to the
visually impaired and some forms of teaching. And if, as
expected, the DPLA excludes books that are still selling on the
market (most exhaust their commercial viability within a few
years), authors and publishers might grant the exercise of their
rights to the DPLA.” — Robert Darton, “The National Digital
Public Library is Launched,” The New York Review of Books, 25
April 2013
Pothole: Open Access Scams
“Jeffrey Beall, a research librarian at the University of Colorado in
Denver, has developed his own blacklist of what he calls
‘predatory open-access journals.’ There were 20 publishers on
his list in 2010, and now there are more than 300. He estimates
that there are as many as 4,000 predatory journals today, at least
25 percent of the total number of open-access journals.
‘It’s almost like the word is out,’ he said. ‘This is easy money, very
little work, a low barrier start-up.’” – Gina Kolata, “Scientific
Articles Accepted (Personal Checks, Too),” New York Times, 7
April 2013
Pothole: Hosting Vulnerabilities
“Amazon on Monday offered a detailed explanation of a
Christmas Eve outage that took down the services of clients like
Netflix. In a nutshell, a developer accidentally deleted some data
from the Amazon Elastic Load Balancing Service (ELB). It took
Amazon some time to figure that out, and when it did, an initial
recovery effort failed, prolonging the Netflix outage…. Netflix
users started reporting problems with the service's Watch
Instantly service on the afternoon of Dec. 24 - meaning many
people couldn't try out Netflix on their new gadgets, or avoid
family members with whom they did not want to interact.” —
Chloe Albanesius, “Amazon Blames Deleted Data for Christmas
Eve Netflix Outage,” PC Magazine, 31 December 2012
Pothole: Big Media Conglomerates
• Google Apps now hosts university email servers — Google@UH
• Amazon will develop CIA cloud services — Steph Solis, “Amazon
enters $600M deal to develop CIA cloud,” Christian Science
Monitor, 21 March 2013
Compiler Bio
Joel Bradshaw’s experience in academic publishing began thirty
years ago while he was completing his Ph.D. in linguistics at the
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. In addition to writing his own
articles for publication, he has worked as a proofreader,
copyeditor, typesetter, managing editor, book review editor, and
peer-reviewer for a wide variety of journal and book projects. He
served as a publications specialist for six years at the UH Center
for Korean Studies before joining the UH Press in 1998 as
journals manager, just in time for the journals transition to digital
publishing.