Electronic Publishing

"Scholarly publishers are well aware that more and more readers and libraries want to get hold of monographs in electronic form. The trick has been how to deliver content digitally without going out of business. Two new models—one with an open-access component, one without—should help publishers test out ways to adapt and, maybe, thrive."

A pilot at the University of Texas at Austin will replace printed textbooks with electronic versions for all students in certain classes, free of charge.

A Companion to Digital Literary Studies is a narrative of what may be called the scene of "new media encounter" — in this case, between the literary and the digital. The premise is that the boundary between codex-based literature and digital information has now been so breached by shared technological, communicational, and computational protocols that we might best think in terms of an encounter rather than a border.

Ithaka's 2006 survey of faculty members sought to determine their attitudes related to online resources, electronic archiving, teaching and learning and related subjects.  This study affords the opportunity to develop trend analysis of many measurements collected in the 2003 and 2000 faculty surveys. As in the past, Ithaka developed a robust set of disciplinary and other demographic analyses that have allowed them to learn more about how best to serve the needs of different types of faculty members. Findings include;

The Gutenberg-e project was created as a bold experiment to explore whether peer-reviewed, born-digital monographs would alter the way historical scholarship is presented, whether scholars would receive the same professional credit for these publications as they would from work published in print, and whether the project would enable the publication of monographs that would otherwise be turned down for financial reasons by university presses. The project has a history that includes both exciting breakthroughs and significant challenges. A number of the authors have created completely new models of collaboration in the scholarly communication process as well as new models of historical scholarship and narrative. We have come to understand that e-books require a significant level of investment in both editorial and technical staff time in order to create publications that reach their full potential as works of digital scholarship. We have also learned that integrating and sustaining this work within a collaborative publishing, library, and technology organization presents significant challenges and great opportunities.

A study of publishing services offered by ARL member libraries that provides valuable context for librarians and campus leaders considering the opportunities offered by this rapidly emerging research library role.

The author argues that there is a critical need for "long-term management and preservation of the digital information, together with mechanisms and policies that encourage people to discover and use it, check references, replicate experiments, and build on each other’s results—whether or not the actual products look like the contemporary journal article."