[Open-access] a new publishing venture

Tue Nov 18 18:14:07 UTC 2014

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. 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?

Many thanks for your time and wisdom,

Simon
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