E-books

Tracey Armstrong, Copyright Clearance Center

We’ve been ready to licence e-books since

people started talking

about them, but there has only really been the need for it in the past few years. It seems we’ve got to a critical mass in terms of users, devices, fl exibility and portability and there are now hundreds of thousands of e-book rights being licensed. There is quite a bit of diversity in e-book licences. Users like uniformity – and that’s the beauty of our subscription model. We have a common set of terms so that users know they can, for example, put hard copies into course packs for students. In addition, we have our Rightslink service, which can be fi xed to individual

pieces of content and allows publishers to monetise e-book content in a customised way. With Rightslink we can offer very specifi c rights, such as putting a particular piece of e-book content onto a poster. Some users want this. When users are on the content they want, they don’t want to go

‘Creating e-books for

multi-purpose devices is a pretty powerful trend and students are consuming more and more content on mobile devices’

elsewhere to fi nd the rights required to use the content. Publishers will want this at the point of use and users will demand it. Creating e-books for multi-purpose

devices is a pretty powerful trend and students are consuming more and more content on mobile devices. Our licences cover this if the content is legally obtained. I think we are going to see more device- neutral e-books from many vendors. There is a long road ahead for e-content,

and it’s not just with research and text books. E-books started with older professional users but we are going to see it in areas like children’s books too. The television programme Sesame Street is now coming out with a series of e-books for three- to six- year-olds.

Casper Grathwohl, vice president and publisher, reference department at Oxford University Press

Academics, like everyone else, are

suffering

from information overload. It’s

taking longer and longer to start projects, because the fi rst thing researchers need to do is to consult the literature. That process is becoming more daunting. The web doesn’t forget, and often doesn’t signpost and indicate the age of materials.

‘Initially there was a

race to put information online. Now the question isn’t whether it is online, but how easy it is to fi nd’

In the past we’ve had curators, like scientifi c publishers, to fi lter and validate content – but now we’re asking the community of scholars to pay attention to academic scholarship elsewhere in places like blogs, listservs and web research environments. Who is vetting and validating this other stuff? Publishers

www.researchinformation.info

can help validate the academic web and I see this role growing. Our new product, Oxford Bibliographies

Online (OBO), is a collection of literature reviews. This is not just a list, like a bibliography, because it provides context with short, peer-reviewed essay pieces that provide connections between works. These show what the most important sources are in each area, and help validate scholarly endeavour. We are launching with four modules – classics, criminology, Islamic studies and social work – and will launch about 10 modules a year, each with thousands of citations. We have a subscription model for OBO,

but also sell individual articles as e-books. This is one of OUP’s fi rst digital-only products, and it was solely developed with digital exploitation in mind. Linking is much easier, and article length isn’t such a big issue as it was in print. If a contributor sends something twice as long as expected, we don’t necessarily have to cut it. Academics tend to start out thinking about

print publication, apart from the younger ones who have done much of their research digitally fi rst. Some younger disciplines also see much more potential in this approach. It

took longer to see the potential of the web in classics than in criminology. Many key classics resources were produced a long time before the internet. OBO helps with the discoverability

of other research. There are a series of defaults such as JSTOR, library catalogues or publisher platforms that OBO uses to access the source content – and these can be set depending on what the institution subscribes to and what works with library catalogues. We want people to get to the source in one click. OUP will be putting our Greek and Latin dictionaries online next year. These will work with the OBO content so, for example, there could be a scroll-over feature in some Greek text to give quick translation or deep translation. Initially, there was a race to put information

online. Now the question isn’t whether it is online, but how easy it is to fi nd. If it wasn’t online it was starting to become invisible – but now it is becoming invisible unless it is discoverable. Publishers need to create visual pathways through information. But the job is never fi nished. It’s like

a garden – as soon as you’ve cleared one section another becomes weedy.

Research Information April/May 2010 21 Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36