Digital Environments, E-Books, and Scholarly Communication

Caren Milloy - JISC Collections

Week two was kicked off with a lecture by Caren Milloy,  Project Manager for JISC Collections. According to their website, JISC Collections is a "membership organization, established by the UK Higher and Further Education funding councils, to support the procurement of digital content for education and research in the UK." Services provided to member libraries include:

• "Expertise in negotiating and procurement, within the scholarly communications sector, to save librarians time and money."
• "High-quality e-resource collections selected for academic research, teaching and learning."
• "Best pricing and licensing, using our collective influence to obtain value for money."
• "Environmental scanning and research into innovative resources, licensing models and evaluation tools."
• "shared knowledge about e-resource acquisition and research."

Karen spoke with us about what JISC does, focusing primarily on e-books/publishing and libraries. She sees one of JISC's main roles as a "form of mediation between publishers and librarians," as the licensing handled by JISC is focused on getting the best price for e-resources, ranging from e-journals, databases, video and sound, and geospatial resources.

It was interesting to learn that pricing is based on a sliding scale, so a large library (such as Oxford) will pay a higher price than a smaller one (such as a local community college). 


Dr. Vanessa Lafaye  - Blackwell Compass

Dr. Vanessa Lafaye of the Blackwell Compass group of journals followed the JISC presentation, and explained how publishers in the humanities are helping scholarly communication by exploiting the possibilities of the digital environment. In her view, publishers are currently embroiled in an "arms race" to develop new technologies to disseminate content. She was quick to point out that nothing is more important than content. According to Dr. Lafaye, "the medium is not the message," as "nothing is more important than the content."

Academic Librarians as Publishers in the Humanities & Social Sciences

Anthony used the last session of today's class to discuss the growing role of libraries as content creators. He explained how academic and research libraries are acting more and more like publishers (interacting directly with authors, creating content, publishing content electronically) and the implications this has for university presses. Libraries have certain opportunities to act as publishers, including "expertise in managing digital data to data publishing" (the dissemination of data); the ability to "get more return from investment in digital platforms by making them into publishing platforms;" and the opportunity to "revitalize university presses" by bringing them back into the fold as central elements of the university world (Anthony maintains that UP are often run by print minded "tweedy-types" who have been on the fringes for decades).

New e-publishing models by private publishers, university presses, and libraries were also covered. He closed out the talk by recommending the following websites for an overview of innovations in e-publishing: 


PLOS - The Public Library of Science - The Library is a publisher of several journals. Originally, these were non-peer-reviewed materials based on the ideas that (1) citation and (2) "the wisdom of the crowds" in a Web 2.0 environment will  provide quality control. The Library has since moved to a traditional peer-review process. 

Bloomsbury Academic - This academic imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. describes itself as "an innovative and exciting new publishing model which will bring your work to the widest possible international audience." The imprint uses an open access model with pay print-on-demand.


Open Humanities Press - The OHP seeks to provide "peer-reviewed literature permanently available, free of charge and freely redistributable by taking advantage of the low cost and wide access of internet distribution." All materials are peer-reviewed.