Thanks Jean-Claude Guédon and Falk Reckling for your comments. It is difficult to answer them succinctly, but I will try.
1. There is a substantial difference between books and articles in the current situation. Almost no researcher reads the printed copy of a journal article any more: they access the online version. Journal publishers who continue to print paper journals are largely wasting money, or doing it for archival purposes. On the other hand, until very recently, no-one read a book in any other format than paper. This is beginning to change with Kindle, iPad and other tablets, but the paradigm change is far from complete. 2. Editorial work on journal articles is mimimal (and often counter-productive), while refereeing (selectivity of articles) is a major issue. With books the situation is reversed. Editorial work is often extensive, and acceptance (the parallel for refereeing) is largely in-house and there are fewer proposals. 3. I used ibooks as my example because they offer the best example of where electronic books are going: interactive. The conventional ebook that one can see in novels or .pub format is just a slightly souped-up pdf of text and a few pictures. An ibook is an interactive object, albeit at present in a proprietary format. I could also have cited Wolframs CDF (Computable Document Format). Have you used an ibook or CDF? Tried to write one? I have done both and the experience tells me that this is going to be an influential development. 4. Why do academic presses produce open access books? Because they are subsidized to do so, and their performance indicators are not profit-oriented, but academic prestige. I know that Jean-Claude realizes this, because he says so. The same for some professional societies. Good for them too, but it is not the norm. 5. Printing, stock and distribution is largely wasted effort for journals. My own university library frequently simply trashes unwanted print copies sent to them as not worth the costs of cataloguing or shelving. 6. A book is not just a long article, any more than the Golden Gate Bridge is just a long log across a creek. Scale changes things. Every engineer knows this. So do the publishing industries. Books have much smaller purchasing groups and much greater costs, in general, than a journal house. They also are not serials and cannot rely on continuing business. 7. Yes, I agree that academic presses will reduce costs to produce books. The ANU Press for example publishes online OA, or on-demand print for a fee. Sensible and makes OA books more viable. But academic presses are subsidized. 8. My point in mentioning other forms of research outputs (and some of them are research outputs in the fine arts, others in engineering, and others in various other disciplines) was to point up the absurdity of interpreting all research outputs literally. I apologise to any pure scientists who are bemused by this exchange. If one only publishes in journals or conferences, then the practices of other disciplines may appear strange. You may note that I did not include furniture prototypes, sculptures, etc to try to be succinct. The concept of making a sculpture open access would be an interesting question for a morning tea discussion. I could have made up a much longer list of objects which are research outputs, including databases and datasets, plant patents, etc. I fully expect that the ARC guidelines will spell out what research outputs they specifically intend. I hope that this explanation has helped. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia
_______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
