"In the age of the Internet, the ways you share and use academic research results are changing — rapidly, fundamentally, irreversibly. There’s great potential in change. After all, faster and wider sharing of journal articles, research data, simulations, syntheses, analyses, and other findings fuels the advance of knowledge. It’s a two-way street — sharing research benefits you and others. But will the promise of digital scholarship be fully realized? How will yesterday’s norms adapt to tomorrow’s possibilities? This website will help you understand the changing landscape and how it affects you and your research. It also offers practical ways to look out for your own interests as a researcher. A scholarly revolution is underway. It enables you to get a greater return from your research. All you have to do is share it."

For decades, university presses and other scholarly and professional publishers in the United States played a pivotal role in the transmission of scholarly knowledge. Th eir books and journals became the “gold standard” in many academic fi elds for tenure, promotion, and merit pay. Th eir basic business model was successful, since this diverse collection of presses had a unique value proposition. Th ey dominated the scholarly publishing fi eld with preeminent sales in three major markets or channels of distribution: libraries and institutions; college and graduate school adoptions; and general readers (i.e., sales to general retailers). Yet this insulated world changed abruptly in the late 1990s. What happened? This book contains a superb series of articles originally published in The Journal of Scholarly Publishing, by some of the best experts on scholarly communication in the western hemisphere, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Th ese authors analyze in depth the diverse and exciting challenges and opportunities scholars, universities, and publishers face in what is a period of unusual turbulence in scholarly publishing. The topics given attention include: copyrights, the transformation of scholarly publishing from a print format to a digital one, open access, scholarly publishing in emerging nations, problems confronting journals, and information on how certain academic disciplines are coping with the transformation of scholarly publishing. This book is a must read for anyone interested in the scholarly publishing industry’s past, its current focus, or future plans and developments.

On the Journal's beta site, we pursue new ideas in publishing and showcase innovative ways to present information for use in medical education, research, and clinical practice. This beta site is part of our commitment to physicians who "Never Stop Learning". Please check back often.

I launched the site – Government Is Good – in the fall of 2007 with absolutely no idea of how it would do. Today, I’ve had over 75,000 visitors to the site. ... I can safely say that more people have read this online material than have read my other three books combined. Two of these books were published by university presses and were considered successful. Besides the larger readership, there have been several other interesting, and unanticipated, advantages to going this route. For example, I’ve had readers from over 50 countries. Most have been from Western and Eastern Europe, but I’ve also had readers from China, India, Russia, Thailand, Nigeria, Argentina, Pakistan, Malaysia, Jamaica, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Zimbabwe, Korea, Qatar, Papua New Guinea, and Mexico. This kind of broad geographical readership would clearly not have happened with a conventionally published book. I have also received a surprising amount of feedback on my work. I could probably count on both hands the number of letters or e-mails I have gotten from strangers about my other books. But I’ve received hundreds of e-mails about the materials on this Web site. ... Even more intriguing has been seeing how my site has been talked about in online discussion groups. My Web traffic software allows me to track back along the web and look at any discussion forum that has put up a link to my site. So, for example, I could go to a Libertarian discussion group and see how they reacted to my arguments. Not surprisingly, they uniformly hated my pro-government ideas and took great pleasure in calling me an idiot -- and worse. On the more positive side, it has been quite gratifying to see people in a political discussion group using material from my site to bolster a point they are making. One person urged other people to visit my site to “see how government programs improve our everyday lives.” ... My Web traffic software also allows me to see which parts of the book have the most readers – again information that one would never have access

democratic government is one of the greatest institutional inventions of modern Western civilization. It allows us to pool our resources and to act collectively to address the serious social, economic, and environmental problems that we are unable to deal with as individuals. The public sector is also how we provide for essential human needs that are neglected by the market – such as a clean air and water, safe workplaces, and economic security. What’s more, government serves as an essential instrument of moral action – a way for us to rectify injustices, eliminate suffering, and care for each other. In short, democratic government is one of the main ways we work together to pursue the common good and make the world a better place.

The Symposium on Electronic Scientific, Technical, and Medical (STM) Journals and Its Implications addressed five key areas. The first two areas addressed--costs of publication and publication business models and revenue--focused on the STM publishing enterprise as it exists today and, in particular, how it has evolved since the advent of electronic publishing. The following section reviewed copyright and licensing issues of concern to the authors and to universities. The final two sessions looked toward the future, specifically, at what publishing may be in the future and what constitutes a publication in the digital environment.

Kachingle is a cute idea, but it won't work.