Author Archives: Caleb McDaniel

One of the subjects that came up frequently in our roundtable and comments thread, as well as my interview with Jason Heppler, was the future of academic publishing.

This is something I’ve thought about a lot lately, partly because I was asked to do a presentation on online publishing for a series being run by the HRC.

It’s also a subject that has come up quite a bit in my Twitter stream lately. Here are some highlights for your perusal:

• The editorial board of an academic journal recently resigned over the restrictive licensing of its publisher, sparking discussion about what academic editors could or should do about open-access publishing.
• Over at the Junto Blog, there’s a great interview about digital dissertations in history.
• Martin Eve published an article in The Guardian on imagining the future of open-access humanities, which profiled several promising new initiatives like the Open Library of Humanities.
• From outside the humanities, the journal Nature recently posted an interesting editorial on moving scholarship beyond paper.

Big issues remain with regard to the evaluation and financial sustainability of these new ideas about digital publishing, but it does seem like some promising conversations are already beginning. Feel free to post your reactions to any of these links in the comments.