The future of the academic monograph has been questioned for over two decades. At the heart of this ‘monograph crisis’ has been a publishing industry centred on the print publication of monographs and a failure and lack of incentives to develop business models that would support a transition to open digital monographs. In this post Mike Taylor argues that if […]
Category: monographs
Knowledge Unlatched, failed transparency, and the commercialisation of open access book publishing
Over recent years, Knowledge Unlatched has harnessed the effectiveness of its consortial funding model to become the largest gatekeeper to open access for scholarly books. But as Marcel Knöchelmann describes, the changing of its status from that of a community interest company to a German GmbH or public limited company, and that it is now fully owned by the consultancy […]
Increasingly collaborative researcher behaviour is the real threat to the resilient academic publishing sector
Traditional academic publishing has been rumoured to be imperilled for decades now. Despite continued criticism over pricing and a growing open access movement, a number of recent reports point to the sector’s resilience. Francis Dodds suggests this is partly attributable to the adaptability of academic publishers but also highlights attitudes of researchers surprisingly committed to the status quo as another […]
What does the future hold for academic books?
Between August 2014 and September 2016, the Academic Book of the Future Project, initiated by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Library, explored the current and future status of the traditional academic monograph. Marilyn Deegan, one of the co-investigators on the project and author of the project report, reflects on its findings, welcoming them as an opportunity to open […]
The Academic Book of the Future: exploring academic practices and expectations for the monograph.
What does the future hold for academic books? Rebecca Lyons introduces The Academic Book of the Future, a two-year project funded by the AHRC in collaboration with the British Library in which a cross-disciplinary team from University College London and King’s College London explores how scholarly work in the Arts and Humanities will be produced, read, shared, and preserved in […]
Are the natural sciences missing out by not embracing the monograph like the humanities and social sciences?
According to a recent HEFCE-commissioned report on monographs and open access, books in the humanities and social sciences are a valuable vehicle for research communication and the synthesis of complex research ideas. Steven Hill welcomes the report’s contributions and also reflects on whether the natural sciences are missing out by not more widely embracing the monograph as part of their own disciplinary practice. One […]
The best things in life aren’t always free, but they are freely available.
Digital publishing in the humanities is set to be discussed at this year’s American Historical Association Annual Meeting. Ahead of the event, Cecy Marden explores how open access outlets provide more than just wider access, but can provide new avenues for this scholarship to be taken. From long-form journalism to Pinterest boards, freely available research is just the starting point. There […]
Why books matter: There is value in what cannot be evaluated.
Academic publishing is intricately bound to evaluation. The demand to publish as much as possible has led to the chopping up of research into minimum publishable units across journals that are easily counted, ranked and evaluated. Books, however, are not so easily accounted for. Julien McHardy argues the value of books is in this freedom from evaluation which offers the chance to pursue greater […]
The internationalisation of academic publishing points to distinctly different audiences for scholarly books.
The importance of book publications in the Social Sciences and Humanities may be widely accepted, but what is the evidence of their impact? Frederik Verleysen and Tim Engels discuss the ways in which specific publications can have broad societal impact by catering to different audiences. Their recent study on the internationalisation of scholarly book publishing points to the broad spectrum of scholarly […]
The Wellcome Trust funds its first open access monograph, helping medical humanities reach wider audiences.
The Wellcome Trust requires that research outputs which arise from their funding are made available in open access formats. This policy notably includes scholarly monographs. Today marks the first day where that policy has been put into practice with an open … Continue reading →