Amazon, e-books and publishers

An article from Business Week on Amazon, Kindle and publishers:

www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_02/b4162050103172.htm

What about the academic press?

Income models for supporting open access

A new guide "Income Models for Supporting Open Access" has been published by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, or Sparc for publishers who want to support open access. From the guide:

Developing a sound business model is a critical concern of publishers considering open-access distribution. Selecting the model appropriate to a particular journal will depend not only on the expense hurdle that must be cleared, but also on the publisher’s mission objectives, size, business management resources, risk tolerance, tax status, and institutional or corporate affiliation.

This Web site and accompanying guide provide an overview of income models currently being used to support the open-access distribution of peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journals. These resources will be a useful tool both for publishers exploring new potential sources of income and for libraries weighing where to direct meager library funds.

JSTOR & Univ. of California Press Collaboration

This is something to watch for those working within the scholarly communication arena. It is the beginnings of a new economic model. Here is a blog post from the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wired Campus.

From a press release dated August 13, 2009:

A new collaboration emerges to improve access to scholarship for faculty, students, and librarians. University of California Press and JSTOR today announced a new effort to invest in a shared online platform and outreach services that promise to create a more seamless, rich online work environment for faculty and students, ease the burden on librarians of negotiating separate license agreements with a multitude of publishers and independent titles, and promote a more cost-effective publishing environment.

University of California Press, the not-for-profit publishing arm of the University of California, and JSTOR, the preservation archive and research platform that is part of the not-for-profit ITHAKA, will work in partnership —and encourage others to join them—to make current and historical scholarly content available on a single, integrated platform, to provide a single point of purchase and access for librarians and end users around the world, and to ensure its long-term preservation.

Beginning in 2011, current content from all University of California Press published journals, including those from scholarly societies, will be hosted on a re-designed JSTOR platform. Faculty and students around the world will be able to access all licensed content on JSTOR – current issues, back issues, and a growing set of primary source materials from libraries – easily and seamlessly. JSTOR’s nearly 6,000 library participants worldwide will be able to license the Press’s current journals, either individually or as part of current issue collections, together with JSTOR back issue collections in a single transaction. The journals will also continue to be preserved in Portico, the digital preservation service that is also part of ITHAKA.

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For more information about the Current Scholarship Program, as this program will be known, see http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/programs/currentScholarship.jsp.