https://www.openbookpublishers.com/

Question inductive

https://torrentfreak.com/book-publishers-expand-uk-pirate-site-blocking-151128/

Blocking at the ISP level has been used as a strategy for preventing copyright for a while. What better methods might exist? Is this method just whack-a-mole?

Chen, Cathy Xi, Gordon Pennycook, and David Rand. ‘What Makes News Sharable on Social Media?’ PsyArXiv, 9 July 2021. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/gzqcd.

While it's probably true overall, there must be some variability across disciplines. For instance, even though I've mostly been teaching in English (since last century), I've rarely been approached by publishers. When reps did approach me, incentives were either vague or almost laughable.

In fact... one case has been a key turning point in my life. A publisher offered me a gift certificate for Tim Horton (sic) if I adopted a textbook chapter (?) in my class. I notified the textbook author, who happened to be bestknown for his critical approach to something very similar. While my sending that email was a relatively insignificant gesture, a friend remarked that it was what I could do in my “sphere of agency”. That comment was important to me and the notion of a “sphere of agency” has remained relevant.

https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/open-research-emerald/our-open-research-policies

Emerald already has progressive green open access / self archiving policies which allow immediate open access for the authors accepted manuscript (AAM) under a creative commons attribution non-commercial license (CC BY-NC). This demonstrates that Emerald cannot agree with much of the statement they are signing. Note, Plan S ask for CC BY or CC BY-ND is permissible under Plan S by exception. The funders' request for a more permissive CC BY license is all I can identify as a potential problem, but there are no specific concerns raised in the statement.

Similar to CUP and IOP, Sage, and Springer Nature, many UK institutions have signed a contract to fund Wiley's publishing activities for four more years as a result of Plan S, regardless of how many authors accepted manuscripts (AAM) are openly available in repositories. This fact undermines the arguments made above by the STM Association about the rights retention strategy (RRS) undermining financial sustainability.

Furthermore, the financial credit cap for the Wiley deal is operationally low, resulting in additional expenditure for institutions at the end of the calendar year when open access support funds are running low. This additional cost is not sustainable for many institutions and unintentionally creates inequitable access to no-additional-cost publishing.

UK institutions have been through several terms of the Springer Compact deal and continue to negotiate amendments and additional terms with added expense. The Springer Compact deal delivers no-additional-cost publishing for an upfront commitment of funds by institutions. Regardless of how many authors accepted manuscripts (AAM) are openly available in repositories institutions continue to support Springer Nature's publishing activities. This fact undermines the arguments made above by the STM Association about the rights retention strategy (RRS) undermining financial sustainability.

Similar to CUP and IOP, many UK institutions have signed a contract to fund Sage's publishing activities for three years as a result of Plan S, regardless of how many authors accepted manuscripts (AAM) are openly available in repositories. This fact undermines the arguments made above by the STM Association about the rights retention strategy (RRS) undermining financial sustainability.

Similar to CUP, some UK institutions have signed a contract to fund IOP's publishing activities for four years as a result of Plan S, regardless of how many authors accepted manuscripts (AAM) are openly available in repositories. This fact undermines the arguments made above by the STM Association about the rights retention strategy (RRS) undermining financial sustainability.

What is allowed = what is legal (i.e. copyright law) and what the journal is willing to publish or reject. If authors are told they should consult the journal and the only response is the journal's own policy, assuming it contradicts the right retention strategy (RRS), the Publisher/Editor/Production Editor will be misinforming the author and denying them their legal rights.

It's my interpretation that the funders agree which is why Wellcome Trust wrote to publishers asking if they would change their policies to reflect the rights retention strategy.

So far as I know this is not tested or based on any evidence. If the publishers think an open accepted manuscript would undermine the version of record, it doesn't demonstrate much confidence in their added value to me.

Consent for the publisher to "access their browser"? Hmm. The Web is a pull-based, client/server, request/response model, not a push model. So it seems odd to me to talk about a publisher needing consent to "access" the user's browser. It is the user's browser (user agent) that made the HTTP request to the publisher's web server. Doesn't the publisher have the right, then, to send a response containing whatever content they wish, since the user requested the content? If the client wishes to filter/block/exclude some of that content, it seems like they have that right, but it seems the responsibility for that is on the client side, not the server side.

Not that I like ads, but I wonder how much of these new policies are based on a misunderstanding of how web technologies actually work....

Maybe the distinction is that the publisher of whom you requested content may dynamically load content (ads) from 3rd parties that the user did not specifically request content from? That too is just how the web works, and it is the publisher who controls what other content to load from other domains/sources. But it still may be a worthwhile distinction...?

Informa Group, que posee editoriales como Taylor & Francis, de Informa Intelligent Division toma medidas en su sector de conferencias y eventos. Provee dos tercios de sus ingresos totales, 2.9 billion dólares. Emite acciones y para el mercado norteamericano acuerdos de deuda. Mientras la parte editorial que aporta un 35% de los ingresos se mantiene sin cambios y con pronósticos estables y sólidos. Stephen Carter CEO

Also the clearest expression of the "publisher" model -- how we're not thinking of teachers as being involved in the creation of the content they teach. 3rd grade math may be a valid case (but even it might not be...), but I'm not sure this analogy extends to, say, college history.

I'm inclined toward the attitude regarding for-profit publishers you describe here. And I don't really buy David's analogy between OER and apps like the Apache server. Maybe this is a difference between K-12 and higher ed? I don't think of OER (even my own) as a generic piece of infrastructure like a bridge that anyone can drive over to the same place. We're talking about students becoming active learners -- why aren't we talking about instructors remaining active teachers?

Yeah, this feels closer to my reaction too.

shift from content to services, openwrapping

Expansion, yes, but also a shift in their model. They are beginning to realize content/information is less marketable (thanks to internet, OER, CC license) and they are now increasingly selling the services mentioned wrapped around OER (openwrapping).

Publishers and platform hosts who want to learn more about embedding annotations can learn more about best practices here.

Sounds a lot like the move of corps to contribute to open source code community.

Pearson out of US k-12 market

Yeah, that's not quite right...

more product/platform, less content

OER adoption rates close to publisher rates

Therein lies the rub. Especially if this is to be “easy”.

Strong words.

There was an interesting example of this during a short conference on digital textbooks, back in late 2014. Cindy Ives interim VP Academic at Athabasca (!) presented the etext pilot project in partnership with publishers. Ives’s approach was quite pragmatic and there’s nothing wrong with doing a pilot project on something like this. By that time, Ives was already involved in OER projects. It still struck a chord with those of us who care about OER, including Éric Francoeur who took an active part in the event and did work to create a free textbook through international and interlinguistic collaboration.

To me, a key notion from the ‘r’ in “OER” is the distinction with those content bundles we still call “textbooks”. Sure, it’s already in the 5-R model. But the “Remix” idea in music is to a large extent about unbundling.

Precisely. To me, this comment also applies to the focus on replacing existing solutions, especially textbooks, but also any kind of content. OER is convenient as a label for a specific thing, related to licenses, but associated with cost (just like “free software” interpreted as no-cost instead of «libre»).

We learn by doing. (And annotations do work on the text version. Neat!)

Didn’t expect to find [h] embedded here. Problem is, it doesn’t allow for annotations of the actual content.

Obvious case for h. Imagine the possibilities of linked open data used in annotating presentations which would be part of scholarly books along with all the necessary material? The mind wanders…

One sure does.

Have they demonstrated so clearly that their textbooks have enhanced learning? Oh, wait. They set the criteria by which we assess learning and push for their own brand of Learning Analytics, so…

Visions and desired scenarios for the future of creative e-publishing industry. Technology trends and signals.

The CRe-AM Initiative (Creativity REsearch Adaptive roadMap, www.cre-am.eu), an FP7 Project funded by the European Commission aiming to bridge communities of creators with communities of technology providers and innovators, launched a survey aiming at collecting visions and desired scenarios for the future of the creative e-publishing industry. Please share your visions and expectations by answering to the 10 mins survey at http://www.dat.demokritos.gr/limesurvey/index.php?sid=84433&lang=en

Share your visions and desired scenarios for the future of the creative e-publishing industry. Invest 10 mins of your time to fill the survey at http://goo.gl/oD0pjJ. The survey is part of the work of the CRe-AM Initiative (Creativity REsearch Adaptive roadMap), an FP7 Project funded by the European Commission aiming to bridge communities of creators with communities of technology providers

Libraries as publishers. Not a bad idea.