[Open-access] a new publishing venture

Jenny Molloy jenny.molloy at okfn.org
Fri Dec 5 19:44:06 UTC 2014


Hi Simon



> In particular, at this early stage it is not clear to us if we are
> registering a protest against the existing academic publishing system by
> demonstrating how easy it is to release high quality open access work, or
> if we really are trying to set in motion a viable alternative with enormous
> capacity to expand. Perhaps at this stage our lack of clarity does not
> matter?
>
>
You might be interested in an OpenCon talk by PLOS co-founder Patrick
Brown, as I have a feeling they were in a similar position to begin with:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7CMMdQgbew

I suspect it doesn't matter! They seem to have done pretty well...

Where have you been trying to raise awareness so far? We also have
open-science and open-humanities mailing lists but actually there are
scholars spread all over the Open Knowledge local and working groups so
pushing this further around the network might be good. Do you have a blog
post somewhere that could be cross posted to a working group blog and
tweeted around?

Jenny

On 18 November 2014 at 18:14, simon cook <simonjohncook at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I was directed to this working group by Neal Bastek after contacting Open
> Knowledge.
>
> My name is Simon Cook. Together with my friend Andrew Holgate, I am
> setting up an electronic publishing venture that will release scholarly
> titles on a Creative Commons license.
>
> Our terms of operation are as follows: we provide authors with the
> services of an electronic publishing house (copy-editing, making of ebook,
> cover design, marketing, etc). These services are provided for free
> provided authors agree to release their book with a CC license that allows
> free sharing. We encourage authors to upload their books to retail
> outlets like Amazon, and so earn some royalties. We pay for our publishing
> work by a crowd-sourcing campaign.
>
> Our crowd-sourcing campaign is here <http://www.patreon.com/yemachine>.
> Further details (in progress): here <http://yemachine.com/publishing/>.
> We have received an offer from the University of St. Andrews (Scotland) to
> host all our published titles (for free download).
>
> We are in the early days of this project. We have already released - as a
> test run - my own essay on Tolkien
> <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OJFOHWE> (CC license). We hope to
> begin regular publication in April 2015 and release, on average, an ebook
> each month for between two and three years. Three distinguished scholars
> (all emeritus professors, one of Cambridge, one of Sussex, one of the
> University of Maryland) have so far agreed to contribute work.
>
> We need help in spreading awareness of our publishing venture in order to
> attract both funding and scholarly contributions.
>
> We would also appreciate any critical comments, pointers or general
> discussion.
>




>
> Many thanks for your time and wisdom,
>
> Simon
>
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