Open Access Books from Bloomsbury Academic

Here's a fine open access initiative, but unusually, it's for books:

Bloomsbury Academic is a radically new scholarly imprint launched in September 2008.

Bloomsbury Academic will begin publishing monographs in the areas of Humanities and Social Sciences. While respecting the traditional disciplines we will seek to build innovative lists on a thematic basis, on issues of particular relevance to the world today.

Publications will be available on the Web free of charge and will carry Creative Commons licences. Simultaneously physical books will be produced and sold around the world.

For the first time a major publishing company is opening up an entirely new imprint to be accessed easily and freely on the Internet. Supporting scholarly communications in this way our authors will be better served in the digital age.

Let's hope it, er, blooms.

The Economics of Open Access Books

I've written before about open access books; but such is my sad state of excitement when I come across good examples, I feel obliged to pass on another one. The home page for the book Introductory Economic Analysis by R. Preston McAfee declares itself to be "the open source introduction to microeconomics" no less, and the online blurb explains why, and also offers some interesting thoughts on the economics of academic book publishing:

Why open source? Academics do an enormous amount of work editing journals and writing articles and now publishers have broken an implicit contract with academics, in which we gave our time and they weren't too greedy. Sometimes articles cost $20 to download, and principles books regularly sell for over $100. They issue new editions frequently to kill off the used book market, and the rapidity of new editions contributes to errors and bloat. Moreover, textbooks have gotten dumb and dumber as publishers seek to satisfy the student who prefers to learn nothing. Many have gotten so dumb ("simplified") so as to be simply incorrect. And they want $100 for this schlock? Where is the attempt to show the students what economics is actually about, and how it actually works? Why aren't we trying to teach the students more, rather than less?

(This closely mirrors Linus' own feelings about the high cost and low quality of proprietary software.)

As a consequence of this unholy alliance of greed and shoddiness, McAfee suggests:

The publishers are vulnerable to an open source project: rather than criticize the text, we will be better off picking and choosing from a free set of materials. Many of us write our own notes for the course anyway and just assign a book to give the students an alternate approach. How much nicer if in addition that "for further reading" book is free.

Introductory Economic Analysis is truly open access, as the author explains: "You are free to use any subset of this work provided you don't charge for it, and you make any additions or improvements to it available under the same terms." To be precise, it is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence. Although I've only just started working through the text, I can heartily recommend it for its pervasive clarity and gentle wit - not qualities that you normally associate with economics textbooks.

As well as for the generous gift of the book itself, I'm also grateful to McAfee for the link he gives to a site that's new to me, called The Assayer, which describes itself as "the web's largest catalog of free books." It turns out the vast majority of these are in the fields of science, maths and computing. It's not a huge collection, but since it includes titles as fine as McAfee's, things are clearly looking up in the world of open access books.

And Here Is The (Open) News...

The BBC has unveiled its long-awaited Open News Archive. Actually, it's made some 80 news reports available - not quite an "open news archive". But to be fair, it's a start, and potentially the beginning of something quite bold.

There are plenty of restrictions, including the fact that the content is only available to Internet users within the UK. But as the BBC itself says, this is just a pilot. Moreover, the issues that need resolving - notably those to do with "rights clearance" - are by no means trivial. Kudos to the BBC for at least trying. Like the open access book project reported below, this is yet another indication of which way the (open) wind is blowing....

Open Access: Books Too

Hitherto, open access has tended to refer to scholarly papers published in journals. This makes the idea of establishing an online "press" devoted to book-length titles particularly interesting.

Of course, online pagination has no real meaning (except in terms of convenient layout), so "long" books are just as easy to produce as "short" papers. In this sense, there's nothing new here. But the move is nonetheless important; let's hope it gain momentum.