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MPub please post your annotations to the Group as opposed to the Public collection.

If you're ever up for it, I could do an entire term on a close reading of this book...

I like this... this is the most speculative you've been in these reading responses. If you can shore this question up with some precise thinking about what things like "humanities," "research output," and public scholarship mean (or at least what you want them to mean) I think you're a good ways towards writing your dissertation.

Is there anything less platform-thinking to be found in the sciences? What, if anything, is distinctly humanist about this?

If you are going to make distinctions like this, you are going to need to develop a working definition of what constitutes "the humanities" and "humanities scholarship" such that distinctions between it and, natural sciences, social sciences, say something concrete. Eve points to this (drawing on McGann), Drucker does better (again invoking McGann in places), but neither really establishes a clear scope for what we're talking about when we talk about the humanities.

PERHAPS (he said, musingly), there ISN'T actually a difference between humanities and sciences communication needs. There's certainly a chunk of DH that has to do with writing journal articles that report on research results, just like in the sciences. There is also a branch of 'humanities' scholarship (again, in journal articles) that is overtly activist... but does that mean it needs different instruments, different channels? Is the need for long-form, monographic publications simply because the humanities lacks a concise formal language like mathematics to represent its theories, its findings?

And if not .. if there is something distinct, then what exactly is it?

Agreed, but why do we think this is the case?

What do you/we mean here by ethics? One what levels do you mean it. I presume you mean something more specific than "not being stinky to people" but I think this needs some scoping out.

Question for thought: does the rise of "library publishing" imply that libraries are somehow more ethical than Publishers? If not, then how would you frame the rationale for library-based publishing?

And yet, are not all of these things not only compatible with OA, but part of the OA landscape we now see? Pay-to-play is, when we call it APC, the dominant OA funding model. Advertising/sponsorship/patronage is perhaps the oldest and best established model for non-paywalled content. And shortcutting in the name of efficiency is at least as common in OA journals than in subscription journals -- in fact, the defenders of the traditionally model typically point to this as a distinction. None of these things is specific to profit-motive; they are all commonplace in everything that has a business model, or at least the challenge of a business model. And, on the flip side, none of these things is about access.

Robust here includes the hard-to-estimate cost of selection, curation, filtering. Which means the presses are investing money identifying the works they WON'T be publishing. Hard to figure that into a monograph subsidy.

Right. We could probably come up with a subsidy-based, bare-bones fee-for-product model that brought monographs out for something approaching $10k. But to do so is to miss the enormous evolved complexity of the scholarly publishing ecosystem and the cultural effects that it provides. The cost of a monograph is one thing; the cost of running the ecosystem is something different.

Though the degree of variation around this figure means it's not very useful on its own as a benchmark.

Back to the efficiency question. Some of the projects we looked at were interested to see how cheaply (no one used that word, tellingly) monographs could be produced, and therefore subsidized. The worry is that boiling the monograph down to a fee for the production of an 80,000-word sequence of text, with a University Press imprimatur stamped on it, is probably doing considerable violence to the nature of the monograph and the kinds of work we expect them to do in the world... our report was trying to problematize this by shedding light on all the various ways in which monographs deliver value.

If I might add to this idea... the economics of journal production work at a different level than the article itself. So we have journals that publish a handful of articles per year, and we see megajournals publishing thousands of articles per year. The business model is coupled to the journal, not the article itself. PLoS achieves great economies of scale on articles by producing zillions of them. SRC also makes articles affordable to publish, by running an extremely lean operation.

Books, on the other hand, are their own business model. Despite the fact that all book publishers tend to cross-subsidize their own titles (the ones that sell offset the ones that aren't like to), the basic math in book publishing is a P&L statement for an individual book in the market.

Taking books out of the market is really jumping into the darkness. Articles, on the other hand, can be bundled in a lot of different ways, on the way to a sustainable economic model.

I'm not sure I would agree that efficiency is what we're after; Kathleen and I were interested in flexibility and interoperability. I'm sure it is possible to conceive of a much more 'efficient' monograph publishing system (and frankly, the $10k monograph subsidy definitely points that way); I am not at all convinced that's what we really want, though. More on this in the next article.

Are they? Or are the units the titles of academic journals -- that to which prestige has accrued? The value of an article is arguable on many axes, but the value of a named journal is a commodity value in exchange between publishers and libraries.

Do you think the work Laura Mandell does in Breaking the Book to be this kind of defamiliarization?

Perhaps we will run out of white men making pronouncements about humanity. We can only hope.

I don't think the "social machines" idea would hold up to much critical analysis. An actor-network critique of it would immediately deconstruct the "human" and "computer-facilitated" binary at the heard of it.

early development of the World-Wide Web at CERN. The Internet was already well established by then.

Fair enough. And yet, the argument Kathleen and I were keen to make is that print may, in many cases, be the best way to reach and audience, make a point, provide a durable record. Targeting print outputs, however, does not have to mean sticking with a print-centric workflow; printed publications can come as easily from web-based editorial processes.

I'll take that challenge... in hindsight, I think the biggest challenge was simply in getting our editorial 'staff' to think about editorial workflow as a fluid, online process rather than the cultivation and perfection of a final printed product. Technically this project went very smoothly. But the social engineering required to move this beyond proof-of-concept is non-trivial, and is the longer-term challenge.

because, in the digital world, it is no longer enough to write. We must also publish. There is no reason not to, and so declining the opportunity is leaving it open to some other organization to benefit from.

If you're not the system administrator, then who is? What power does that involve? What convenience are you trading for that power? Is it worth it?

meaning... to incorporate the new technology into the institution while guarding against being disrupted or transformed by any of it.

It's the open web, therefore Hypothes.is

Publishing @ SFU Master of Publishing Program, MPub Hrm... I wonder how we keep these annotations from quickly becoming keyword spamm etc.

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