The Hybrid Publishing Lab organized a panel on the critical idea of “open” at the biggest european conferecne on digtal society, media and technologies – re:publica 13. Watch the recorded discussion with Mercedes Bunz, Nishant Shah, David Berry and Cornelius Puschmann:
Information
The recent launch of the Digital Public Library of America and the Internet Archive’s release of a vast collection of historical software once more shows that the quest for Open Access to scientific publications is just one side of the story of scholarly digital publishing. Especially in the humanities the findability or even accessibility of historical resources on the Internet is considered to be of great importance. Even if their scope is not limited to scholars the DPLA and its European pendant Europeana as well as the Internet Archive provide invaluable resources for researchers all over the planet. Continue Reading…
Bjoern Brembs from the University of Regensburg did a short analysis of the german library statistics regarding the money they spend on publications like journals. In the statistics (freely available here) you can check every one of the 250 university libraries and how much they spent on what in which year. Here is what he found:
German libraries spent in 2011
- 170 million € on books
- 130 million € on subscriptions
This amounts to an average of about 660k € in subscription costs for each library (I did not check the distribution to see if I should have calculated the median instead). Given a conservative estimate of publisher profits of around 30%, this suggests that each German library paid about 220k € to publishers’ shareholders in 2011. Obviously, this will vary from library to library. For instance, our library here in Regensburg paid about 700k € in 2011 towards publishers’ profits.
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What one could also see was that an average German library in 2011 subscribed to 2k print journals and 15k e-Journals, at an average cost of 34€ per title.
Want to work with us? We are looking for nice and intelligent people that contribute to our plans. Now what are these plans? The Hybrid Publishing lab is, among other things, creating an open source toolbox for publishing infrastructures, specifically at the world of academic and independent publishing. And yes, of course we are committed to Open Access.
The team you will join is a group of 18 alert and curious researchers that are interested in the change of publishing and meet regularly in Lüneburg to coordinate their efforts.
The two jobs open at the moment are covering the area of Design Research and/or Computer Science. These jobs shall help the team with exploring publishing modes, by creating a combination of multi-format distribution, and with considering the role of social media.
Please email your job applications and a CV to the emails you’ll find on the official job descriptions below. And don’t hesistate to contact us if you have any questions. We are looking forward to hear from you!
Official Job description here (english):
Research Associate in Design Research
Research Associate in Computer Science
(Added 2nd March: … as some of you have asked: your English speaking skills are more important than your German speaking skills…)
Official Job description (german):
Wissenschaftliche/r Mitarbeiter/in Designforschung
Wissenschaftliche/r Mitarbeiter/in Informatik
The Hybrid Publishing Lab and the HyperImage team will be presenting at CeBIT 2013 from March 5th–9th. Visit our booth at the exhibition grounds in Hannover. We are located in Hall 9, Stand C50.
The Hybrid Publishing Lab researches and develops new forms of scientific publication and communication for the humanities in cooperation with publishers, librarians, software developers, authors and other stakeholders.
The image-oriented research platform HyperImage continues to be developed and refined as a concrete application of the HPL’s research. The position and identity of image details are usually described and delimited in conventional terms, using symbols, words or gestures. HyperImage sup ports the precise marking of image regions, allowing them to be linked to other regions and data, as well as supporting sophisticated search technologies on the corpus. Images and metadata can be imported from external repositories as well as from collections on local storage media.
At the Kick-Off meeting last week in Hamburg, the Hybrid Publishing Lab joined the Leibniz multidisicplinary research network “Science 2.0″ hold by the German National Library of Economics Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (ZBW). Within the network, more than 30 institutes as well as Wikimedia Germany investigate new working habits, technological developments in current and future research, and publishing processes within the scientific community. Over the course of the next ten years, the network will adopt a highly interdisciplinary research approach to find relevant answers to the challenges around Science and Social Networks, Open Science and new communication strategies as well as other working environments for researchers in the digital age.
From the Press Release by the ZBW:
The term Science 2.0 encompasses the rise of entirely different and primarily digital means of participation, communication, collaboration and discourse in the research and publishing processes. ZBW director Tochtermann explains: “The use of social media in companies has been a subject of investigation for years. Social media are widely used within the scientific community nowadays, but surprisingly this has not been based on systematic and interdisciplinary research or even been the subject of concomitant research. This is where the multidisciplinary Research Network Science 2.0 comes in. We are looking for the key to a completely innovated research and publishing support that would not even be possible without social media.”
The research network is anchored in the Leibniz Association and vigorously promoted by member institutes of the Leibniz Association.
More about Science 2.0 at leibniz-science20.de (German).
Services such as Mendeley, Academia.edu and ResearchGate promise to transform research: they connect researchers in collaborative digital environments, provide venues for publication, and develop alternative metrics for measuring impact and reputation. Backed by venture capital, these services have seen considerable growth during the last years. But will they turn out to be financially sustainable?
We provide a quick glance at the prospective business models of three academic social networking services.
Ross Mounce, PhD Student at the University of Bath, is building a list of Gold OA journals with all licence details. He already scored 531 out of 985 journals he found here, so there’s 454 left still to score. He has started the task on a collaborative, editable Google Spreadsheet here.
If you have some spare time please help him to fill-in the data on his spreadsheet (sheet called ‘Data’). All data filled-in on the datasheet will be public data for anyone to use/copy/remix CC0.
Continue Reading…
