Directors of ten law school libraries, including Harvard’s John Palfrey, have signed an “aspirational” document, called the Durham Statement on Open Access, that “calls for all law schools to stop publishing their journals in print format and to rely instead on electronic publication coupled with a commitment to keep the electronic versions available in stable, open, digital formats.”

This is wonderful.

The statement calls for the end of paper versions of the journals, not merely supplementing them with electronic versions, because printing them costs so much and is bad for the environment. I don’t know if the drafters of the Statement were also thinking that going purely digital would help force a change in mindsets, but I suspect that that would be one of the most important consequences.

[Tags: open_access law_school law_journals publishing media scholarship copyright copyleft everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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In something like 2002, I wrote and posted a kid’s version of my book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, under a non-commercial Creative Commons license. Now Peter Ford has taken it upon himself to create a site with a copy of it with a facility that lets anyone comment on any paragraph. He’s hoping to get the must off of it, stem the link rot, etc.

I totally love this.

[Tags: crowd-sourcing wisdom_of_the_crowd publishing small_pieces books ]

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Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur are writing a book on innovative business models that’s due out in May. That seems to them to be too far away, so they’re thinking that maybe for $24 you could get a subscription to their book that provides:

* first & exclusive access to raw book content

* influence authors

* x installments of book chunks (in a non-linear order – as we write them)

* 50% discount off the final book (approx.)

* participate in exclusive book chunk webinars

* access to templates

* being part of the business model innovation community

Alex calls this idea a prototype and welcomes comments, as well as suggestions for what other benefits the authors might offer. (He does not require that you pay a subscription to read his blog and comment on this idea itself, however. Recursion is not always a good idea.)

I’m glad they’re floating this idea — because floating ideas rises all tides? — although I am skeptical. This doesn’t sound like a book that’s so urgent that people will pay a 50% premium ($24 + half off the printed version) for some number of out-of-sequence rough drafts. Of course, I could be wrong about that, especially since about a dozen people in the comments to Alex’s post have already said they’d sign up. But, since the authors benefit from comments from early readers, this business model also has a cost to the authors. It limits the community, but maybe it will also gel the community. We won’t know until we know.

These social projects are all in the details. In 2000-1, I wrote Small Pieces Loosely Joinedcompletely in public, posting my current draft every night. I got some excellent commentary and during the dark days of writing that book I received encouragement that was quite important to me. But I inadvertently structured the engagement in way that discouraged readers. The writing process was Penelope-like, so I think I would have done better to have updated the site only when I had finished a complete draft of a chapter. Readers get understandably discouraged by commenting on a draft that is undrafted the next day.

I wrote the next book, Everything Is Miscellaneous, offline for reasons I can’t articulate, except to say that I felt that the book posed a challenge to me as a craftsperson. So, I blogged about the ideas in the book and floated pieces from it in various forms, but I composed the actual text with the door closed. I’m not recommending that. I’m thrilled by the fact that writers now routinely break out of the old “private ’til it’s published” constraint. But there are many ways to do that, as well as times when you shouldn’t do it. There may even be times when you should charge $24 for the service.

All ideas are good until proven otherwise. [Tags: business_models publishing writing Alex_Osterwalder Yves_Pigneur books media ]

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Publishers mean no disrespect when they refer to the load of unsolicited manuscripts as the “slush pile.” Actually, they do mean disrespect. But we all know that somewhere in the slush there must be some manuscripts worth publishing.

So, Harper Collins is crowd-sourcing it. At Authonomy, you can add your own ms, or vote on those of others. The top 5 at the end of every month get a once-over from a HC editor. And the rest can go publish themselves at Lulu, where you can find my own non-award-winning young adult novel, My $100 Million Dollar Secret.

(Thanks to Elaine Warner at A Broad Abroad for the link.)

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous writing publishing slush_pile ]

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Mygazines.com is an interesting idea. Currently in beta, it’s designed to let anyone upload any magazine or magazine article, and then share the content, using the familiar elements of content-based social networking sites (or, more accurately, the social networking elements of content-based sites).

The site unfortunately has little information about itself, so I don’t know what they think they’re going to do about the obvious copyright issues. The existing content includes the magazines’ ads, so maybe the site hopes publishers will see some benefit in being scanned ‘n’ read. (As an example, here’s a link to the complete contents of the current issue of The New Yorker.)

While the tool for reading is pretty slick, the process of posting to enable said slickness seems pretty onerous.

I’m interested to see what becomes of it… [Tags: copyright magazines publishing media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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The NY Times reports that Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences will vote next week on a proposal that would require faculty to deposit a copy of their articles in an open access Harvard repository even as they submit those articles to academic journals.

I like this idea a lot. I only wish it went further. Faculty members will be allowed to opt-out of the requirement pretty much at will (as I understand it), which could vitiate it: If a prestigious journal accepts an article but only if it’s not been made openly available, faculty members may well decide it’s more important for their careers to be published in the journal. I would prefer to see the Harvard proposal paired with some form of official encouragement to tenure committees to look favorably upon faculty members who make their work widely and freely available.

Nothing is without drawbacks. A well-run, reliable, thorough peer-review system costs money. But there’s also an expense to funding peer review by limiting access to the work that makes it through the process. Likewise, while the current publication system directs our attention efficiently, but there’s a price to the very efficiency of such a system: innovation can arise from what looked liked inefficiencies. There’s value in the long tail of research.

If we were today building a system for evaluating scholarly research and for making it maximally available, we would not build anything like the current paper-based system. Well, we are building such a system. The Harvard proposal will, in my opinion, help.

Disclosure: I’m a fellow at the Berkman Center which is part of the Law School, not the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and I’m not a faculty member in any case. Stuart Shieber, one of the sponsors of the proposal, is a director of the Center.) [Tags: open_access peer_review scholarship research publishing media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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