While we may have reached a way to support open access articles, writes Joseph Esposito, the case of longer items like books is more difficult: author fees would be unreasonable, yet the cost of producing them and hosting them is high. It's the same sort of problem that exists for MOOCs, which is why business writers are sceptical of them. This post points to an initiative created by Eric Hellman called Unglue.it - the URL is the same as the company name. " A Web community is built around Unglue.it, which proposes books that it would like to see OA.... Publishers (or the estates of authors) respond to these nominations and offer to make some titles available on the site. The community then switches to crowdfunding mode, attempting to chip in enough money to release the copyright." It doesn't matter whether this idea works or not - what matters is that it is pointing the way to a wider world of open content.
Today: 4 Total: 84 [Direct link] [Share]
