Dear list,
I haven't seen this item mentioned yet and when I did, I thought of the
current content/copyright discussion.
"Sir John Sulston, Nobel prize winner and one of the architects of the
Human Genome Project, has teamed up with Bloomsbury to edit a new series
of books that will look at topics including the ethics of genetics and
the cyber enhancement of humans.
The series will be the first from Bloomsbury's new venture, Bloomsbury
Academic, launched late last year as part of the publisher's post-Harry
Potter reinvention. Using Creative Commons licences, the intention is
for titles in the imprint to be available for free online for
non-commercial use, with revenue to be generated from the hard copies
that will be printed via print-on-demand and short-run printing
technologies.
Publisher Frances Pinter is talking to "very high-level academics"
across the disciplines to build up the list, which she hopes to reach
200-odd titles a year by 2014, but Sulston and his colleague John
Harris, professor of bioethics at Manchester University, are the first
editors of a series she's signed up. The books she hopes to publish are
intended to appeal to the "educated layman" as well as to academic
circles and should "help the academic world speak to people who should
be listening to what they have to say," she said today. "
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/12/bloomsbury-science-free-online
So Bloomsbury is going both ways with their product: free science
content on the web that they hope to print and make a profit from. These
aren't journals and I don't know what the plan is for images, but does
this sound like a step in the right direction?
John
