Digital technologies are changing the way we read history. With the popularization of consumer electronic e-readers like Kindle, Sony Reader, Kobo, and (yes) iPad, many textbook publishers are trying to take advantage of this opportunity to reach digital reading audiences. Unfortunately, the Kindle DX digital textbook pilot program at Princeton […]
Scholarly Publishing
12 posts
Last week, we hosted a writing workshop for history and geography graduate students at the University of British Columbia called “Reaching a Popular Audience” sponsored by the Network in Canadian History & Environment and The History Education Network. The intent of the workshop was to introduce graduate students to some […]
On Friday afternoon, I will be leading a session at the Reaching a Popular Audience Writing Workshop at UBC about blogging and online self-publishing. Historians and academics have been blogging for many years now, but it is still a generally uncommon practice in academia. However, online publishing through academic blogging […]
As environmental historians, we do a lot of reading and writing. Readers of this blog (and many other scholars) are beginning to do more of their reading in a digital format. If we consider how much digital reading we do each day, including websites and email, it is obvious that […]
Academic historical research does not usually reach a very wide audience. Some of the best work in Canadian and environmental history, produced by the country’s top scholars, can almost only be found in the pages of scholarly journals and university press monographs. From time to time, a historian will break […]
Remember a couple of years ago when there was a lot of discussion about employers using internet-based social networks, like Facebook and MySpace, to screen job applicants? We were advised to use these so-called Web 2.0 tools cautiously to avoid the possibility of a potential employer discovering embarrassing photos or […]
I really should have found this source sooner. Charles W. Bailey’s Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals is the best place to start for historians (or anyone else) looking to learn about open access and scholarly publishing. According to the description of the book, […]
As promised, I have put together some general reflections on the recent Public Knowledge Project conference held in Vancouver from July 8th-10th. I attended the conference as part of my work on the Notes on Knowledge Mobilization page on the NiCHE website. I went to the conference with the intention […]
Rowland Lorimer, director of the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing, announced the beginning of a new journal called Scholarly Research and Communication at the Public Knowledge Project conference this afternoon. Lorimer’s closing keynote for the conference was a pretty rousing tour of the history of scholarly publishing and the […]
This morning, I attended a very interesting session on the economics of open access publishing for scholarly communications at the Public Knowledge Project conference in Vancouver. The session began with a presentation from Heather Morrison, who spoke about the broad ideas and macroeconomic view of open access publishing for scholarly […]
The first full day of the Public Knowledge Project conference in Vancouver was indeed a very full day. Here are some of the highlights from what I saw today: NgÅ©gÄ© wa Thiong’o spoke about the impact of digital publishing and open access on the dissemination of writing in non-Western languages […]
This evening, John Willinsky opened the Public Knowledge Project conference at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue in downtown Vancouver. Professor Willinsky’s keynote address, titled “Free? What’s So Special About Learning? The Intellectual Property Argument”, outlined a new way of thinking about the debate over open-access in scholarly publishing. […]