Paul Krugman has an interesting column on the future of publishing, in which he notes (citing Esther Dyson) that in a digital world where copying is easy and perhaps unstoppable, electronic books will be given away for free in order to promote the sales of other goods and services.
I am a great admirer of Krugman, [...]

On one side we have user-generated content (UGC), exemplified by Wikipedia; on the other we have traditional publishing, which is characterized by an editor or series of editors (acquiring editor, developmental editor, copy editor, production editor), who review submitted material and make judgments as to its shape, argument, and suitability for publication. UGC is on [...]

The Inside Higher Education link that Peter Brantley recently sent to a list, regarding the open-access Museum Anthropology Review, reminded me of some distinctions I like to make, when given the opportunity, about the culture of journals vs. the cultures of books. It pertains to the drivers of the different products, and the people [...]

The University of Pittsburgh Press has just made an extraordinary announcement. The Press plans to make its entire backlist available for free online two years after formal, print publication. Here is what the AAUP newsletter has to say about this:
Recently, the University of Pittsburgh Press has announced that it is working to [...]

Cory Doctorow has some interesting things to say about the Amazon Kindle in The Guardian. Doctorow doesn’t like it much, as it doesn’t conform to his view of the Internet, which includes the ability to move files around without restriction.
What Doctorow doesn’t say, however, is that if the Kindle [...]

Having gotten caught up to some extent in the Open Access debate over research publications, I am continually astonished by the lack of objectivity and the sheer partisanship of many of the participants. For those unfamiliar with Open Access or OA, this is the principle of “information wants to be free” applied to the [...]

I have been following the developments of SCOAP3 , which is one of the more enterprising organizations in the Open Access world. SCOAP3, an acronym for Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (which actually presents the “3″ as an exponent; very clever), is attempting to make all research publishing Open Access [...]