Arcadia Fund: “The Role of Book Reviews in the Academic Book Ecosystem – A Report”
From The Arcadia Fund:
In 2020, we asked our summer intern, Katie Phillips (at the time, a final year MSc student in Archaeological Science at University College London) to research the role of scholarly book reviews, with a focus on reviews of open access books. Over her six-week internship, Katie tested Arcadia co-founder Peter Baldwin’s suggestion that major book review publications overlook open access books, and examined the importance and relevance of book reviews to open access publishing.
Katie reviewed a decade’s worth of book reviews from the London Review of Books and LA Review of Books. She found that open access books have been reviewed in both publications, but only rarely. Through interviews with publishers, librarians and academics, Katie also contextualised her findings with fascinating anecdotes and views that shed light on the academic publishing system.
Direct to Full Text Report and Dataset (via Zenodo)
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5533887
Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Data Files, Interviews, News, 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.