Knowledge Unlatched: a new academic publishing business model
"The Problem: specialist books in the Humanities and Social Sciences (including but not exclusively monographs) are under threat due to spiralling prices and reduced library funds.
Access is restricted: while academics could choose to bypass existing publishers and just post content on the Web, the general consensus within academia is that they would prefer to have their books professionally published.
Only a few hundred copies make it into the eight to twelve thousand research universities, and very few teaching universities have access to these materials. For many individuals private purchase is beyond their reach.
A Possible Solution: cover the costs of creating the first digital copy through a library consortium and make the titles open access. Publishers would continue to generate additional revenues from the sale of print, ePub and PDFs in bespoke formats."
(Frances Pinter, 2011)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Zelda Zine 1: a new digital age printed video game fanzine
"Printed video game magazines might be an endangered species these days, but it's not such a bad time for fan-made zines. While every other month we hear news of a different publication we grew up with limiting or eliminating its monthly issues, not all is bleak for people who like tangible content. ...
A printed zine like this remains relevant in today's digital age by featuring content that deals with nostalgia and connections to past games. In fact, art and stories that capture players' unique histories and experiences with video games age gracefully over time.
Zelda Zine 1 has a certain timelessness that allows you to pick it up and experience it fresh, years after it was printed. It doesn't feel dated with tidbits of information about new modes or weapons or when the launch date will be when the game already came out months ago. It feels more like Link in Ocarina of Time, reverting to his younger self to discover that Kakariko Village is just as he left it. That is, the contributors' accounts and interpretations of the legend (both written and visual) will always remain in their minds as they now share them with the world on paper."
(Alejandro Quan-Madrid, 22 February 22 2012, Bitmob.com)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Scientific publishing: the price of information
"On January 21st Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote a blog post outlining the reasons for his longstanding boycott of research journals published by Elsevier. This firm, which is based in the Netherlands, owns more than 2,000 journals, including such top-ranking titles as Cell and the Lancet. However Dr Gowers, who won the Fields medal, mathematics's equivalent of a Nobel prize, in 1998, is not happy with it, and he hoped his post might embolden others to do something similar.
It did. More than 2,700 researchers from around the world have so far signed an online pledge set up by Tyler Neylon, a fellow-mathematician who was inspired by Dr Gowers's post, promising not to submit their work to Elsevier's journals, or to referee or edit papers appearing in them. That number seems, to borrow a mathematical term, to be growing exponentially. If it really takes off, established academic publishers might find they have a revolution on their hands. ...
Dr Neylon's petition, though, is symptomatic of a wider conflict between academics and their publishers—a conflict that is being thrown into sharp relief by the rise of online publishing. Academics, who live in a culture which values the free and easy movement of information (and who edit and referee papers for nothing) have long been uncomfortable bedfellows with commercial publishing companies, which want to maximise profits by charging for access to that information, and who control many (although not all) of the most prestigious scientific journals."
(Feb 4th 2012, The Economist)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Ensemble Logic: early experiments writing for hypertext
"Essays, email, poetics, directions, maps, images. ensemble logic is a seriously beautiful series of fragments that together make an 'ensemble' arrangement that revels in the pleasure of reading and writing. The publication is a chance to consider how writing for an electronic environment translates into (back-to) the book. Each fragment is marked with a location guide that allows the reader to easily find the complete work on the CDROM included with the book and on the web. The CDROM archives the complete eWRe site up to July 2000."
Electronic Writing Research Ensemble (2000). Ensemble Logic. T. Hoskin and S. Rob. Adelaide, South Australia.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Wisdom of the Masses' perception of the web, can in some cases promote content perceived to be useless over content perceived as useful
"According to the 'long tail' principle, ICT innovations in content creation and distribution such as virtual inventories, Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) and other types of video on demand, music self-publishing in social networking sites and digital printing challenge old rationales that justified the adoption of mass-market models for the production and publication of cultural goods. These technologies dissolve the spatial and physical constraints which limited the range of creative content goods available in the market and open the gates for a flood of new (and old) media. In doing so they have created a new problem, of a navigational nature: in principle, diversity enables access to content goods better suited to a customer's preferences, but it also makes finding them more difficult (194).
The main reason for the success of Google's search services has been its ability to address Internet users' need for relevant resources, by adopting a scalable algorithm that establishes a webpage's rank according to its reputation. However, its user interface is still too rigid and makes it difficult, for example, to fully specify the type of content a user is looking for. Additionally, this technique, based on a 'Wisdom of the Masses' perception of the web, can in some cases promote content perceived to be useless over content perceived as useful, and be tampered with through search optimisation techniques such as link farming (195)."
(Juan Mateos-Garcia, Aldo Geuna and W. Edward Steinmueller, 2008, p.85)
194: In a context where information is abundant, attention becomes the scarce resource (Simon, H. A. 1971, 'Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World', in Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Pres).
195: i.e. exchanging reciprocal links with web sites in order to increase search engine optimization, as search engines often rank sites according to, among other things, the quantity of sites that link to them.
Fig.1 Perry Ogden (2003). 'Bono with Louis Le Brocquy'.
2). Fabienne Abadie, Ioannis Maghiros, and Corina Pascu (editors) 2008 'The Future Evolution of the Creative Content Industries: Three Discussion Papers', Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, EUR 23633 EN - 2008
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
