New Article: "Academic E-Books: Innovation and Transition" by Peter Brantley
A new article by Peter Brantley from the Publisher’s Weekly web site.
From the Article:
There is a growing crisis in the academic monograph marketplace. College and university libraries are experiencing budget cuts; there are too many presses publishing too many titles; there’s growing pressure to figure out open access (OA) solutions, particularly in the face of the outrageous Research Works Act; and, aside from crossover or trade titles from the larger presses like Oxford, there is a sense that the barely adequate supply of funding will soon start to slide off a cliff.
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Libraries, presses, and scholars are pressing forward with several interesting proposals (Clifford Lynch of CNI wrote a prescient overview of the options in 2010). And I just attended an investigatory meeting, held at the Radcliffe Institute, at Harvard for one of the most promising new efforts: the development of a Global Library Constortium (GLC), the brainchild of Frances Pinter, former publisher of Bloomsbury Academic in the UK, and founder of EIFL, an international library consortium of consortia supporting greater access to information.
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The GLC proposal would operate on a similar basis, with libraries pooling together into a membership coalition that purchases the rights to titles offered by participating publishers. Those books would then be made available on an open access basis, perhaps with Creative Commons license terms. Libraries would place bids for each offered title into a pool, in a fashion similar to the way Groupon works; if there was sufficient interest to hit the price trigger point, the publisher would release the title into the open access pool with costs apportioned among participating institutions. Once made open access, titles would be publicly readable through a web browser interface, but downloadable PDFs or EPUBs would only be freely available to GLC members.
Learn More by Reading the Complete Article by Peter Brantley
See Also: Frances Pinter Bio and CV
Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Funding, Libraries, Open Access, Publishing

About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.