Publication focuses on digital libraries
The Scholarly Publishing Office of the U-M Library has published a new open access monograph, Economics and Usage of Digital Libraries: Byting the Bullet, edited by SI’s Jeff MacKie-Mason and Wendy Pradt Lougee, university librarian at the University of Minnesota.
The publication is a collection of essays that grew from a research project on the economics of digital libraries and a related conference that was chaired by MacKie-Mason, who is the Arthur W. Burks Collegiate Professor of Information and Computer Science.
In the late 1990′s, researchers and digital library production staff at U-M collaborated on the Pricing Economic Access to Knowledge (PEAK) project.
To conduct a field experiment to answer questions about the interplay between pricing models and usage, researchers developed a full-scale, production-quality digital access system that gave a select group of universities access to content from all of Elsevier’s scholarly journals (then numbering about 1200) under a range of pricing models.
The experiment culminated in a lively conference that engaged scholars, library practioners, and publishers. This volume captures some of the most interesting and provocative discussions to come out of that conference.
PEAK was a ground-breaking effort in its day, and references to the project have continued over time. It raised important questions about the potential for highly functional journal content and new economic models of publishing. In today’s context of socially-enabled systems and open-access publishing, the motivating questions of PEAK remain relevant.
The newly published monograph is part of the SPO Scholarly Monograph Series, an interdisciplinary collection of original, open-access scholarly monographs and essays.
The University of Michigan Library, through its Scholarly Publishing Office, provides academic publishing services that are responsive to the needs of both producers and users, that foster a sustainable economic model for academic publishing, and that support institutional control of intellectual assets.
Explore posts in the same categories: Faculty, ResearchTags: digital libraries, economics, pricing models
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