Although digital technologies promised a renaissance in the publishing industries, publishers still struggle with digital innovations and try to hold on to traditional workflows, production, form and business models. How can we open-up this top-down mode of communication? In this episode we discuss the future of (digital) publishing through interviews with Janneke Adema, Michael Dieter, Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke. How to approach the act of publishing (digital) in the postdigital age? What happens when we approach the book as an apparatus and what does that mean for the book as we know it? What does is mean for the notion of the author and the reader when we perform the book differently?
MULTIFILE
This is the last of a series of posts that belong to a research aimed at automated production of an audiobook within the Hybrid Publishing Work!ow.
The field of applied linguistics is increasingly adopting open science practices. As open access publication gains traction, ethical issues emerge that need to be addressed by the field. This viewpoint paper addresses the concern that open science is not equally open for everyone. This paper describes how open access publication is increasingly being commercialized and explains how open access publication coincides with systemic inequality. We offer the following viewpoints for the field to consider:1.) We are morally obligated to make our research output accessible.2.) Hybrid, Gold, and Green open access publishing lead to systemic inequality in open access publishing, benefiting commercial publishers and those working in research-intensive universities and rich countries.3.)Diamond open access publication removes the systemic inequalities; hence, Diamond open access should be prioritized over Hybrid, Gold, and Green open access publication models.4.)We should move away from publish-and-read agreements and Green open access publishing, because they prevent system change.5.)Through our choices in our work as researchers, editors, reviewers, authors and teachers, we can contribute to the transition towards truly equitable open access publishing practices.6.)Senior researchers are in the position and have the moral obligation to be drivers of these changes.
Collaborative networks for sustainability are emerging rapidly to address urgent societal challenges. By bringing together organizations with different knowledge bases, resources and capabilities, collaborative networks enhance information exchange, knowledge sharing and learning opportunities to address these complex problems that cannot be solved by organizations individually. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the apparel sector, where examples of collaborative networks for sustainability are plenty, for example Sustainable Apparel Coalition, Zero Discharge Hazardous Chemicals, and the Fair Wear Foundation. Companies like C&A and H&M but also smaller players join these networks to take their social responsibility. Collaborative networks are unlike traditional forms of organizations; they are loosely structured collectives of different, often competing organizations, with dynamic membership and usually lack legal status. However, they do not emerge or organize on their own; they need network orchestrators who manage the network in terms of activities and participants. But network orchestrators face many challenges. They have to balance the interests of diverse companies and deal with tensions that often arise between them, like sharing their innovative knowledge. Orchestrators also have to “sell” the value of the network to potential new participants, who make decisions about which networks to join based on the benefits they expect to get from participating. Network orchestrators often do not know the best way to maintain engagement, commitment and enthusiasm or how to ensure knowledge and resource sharing, especially when competitors are involved. Furthermore, collaborative networks receive funding from grants or subsidies, creating financial uncertainty about its continuity. Raising financing from the private sector is difficult and network orchestrators compete more and more for resources. When networks dissolve or dysfunction (due to a lack of value creation and capture for participants, a lack of financing or a non-functioning business model), the collective value that has been created and accrued over time may be lost. This is problematic given that industrial transformations towards sustainability take many years and durable organizational forms are required to ensure ongoing support for this change. Network orchestration is a new profession. There are no guidelines, handbooks or good practices for how to perform this role, nor is there professional education or a professional association that represents network orchestrators. This is urgently needed as network orchestrators struggle with their role in governing networks so that they create and capture value for participants and ultimately ensure better network performance and survival. This project aims to foster the professionalization of the network orchestrator role by: (a) generating knowledge, developing and testing collaborative network governance models, facilitation tools and collaborative business modeling tools to enable network orchestrators to improve the performance of collaborative networks in terms of collective value creation (network level) and private value capture (network participant level) (b) organizing platform activities for network orchestrators to exchange ideas, best practices and learn from each other, thereby facilitating the formation of a professional identity, standards and community of network orchestrators.
The scientific publishing industry is rapidly transitioning towards information analytics. This shift is disproportionately benefiting large companies. These can afford to deploy digital technologies like knowledge graphs that can index their contents and create advanced search engines. Small and medium publishing enterprises, instead, often lack the resources to fully embrace such digital transformations. This divide is acutely felt in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Scholars from these disciplines are largely unable to benefit from modern scientific search engines, because their publishing ecosystem is made of many specialized businesses which cannot, individually, develop comparable services. We propose to start bridging this gap by democratizing access to knowledge graphs – the technology underpinning modern scientific search engines – for small and medium publishers in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Their contents, largely made of books, already contain rich, structured information – such as references and indexes – which can be automatically mined and interlinked. We plan to develop a framework for extracting structured information and create knowledge graphs from it. We will as much as possible consolidate existing proven technologies into a single codebase, instead of reinventing the wheel. Our consortium is a collaboration of researchers in scientific information mining, Odoma, an AI consulting company, and the publisher Brill, sharing its data and expertise. Brill will be able to immediately put to use the project results to improve its internal processes and services. Furthermore, our results will be published in open source with a commercial-friendly license, in order to foster the adoption and future development of the framework by other publishers. Ultimately, our proposal is an example of industry innovation where, instead of scaling-up, we scale wide by creating a common resource which many small players can then use and expand upon.
Vanuit de ‘Renew the Book Challenge’, een initiatief van de Groep Algemene Uitgevers (GAU), is als specifieke uitdaging genoemd: ‘find new seductive ways of displaying books at (online) retail channels. Met deze KIEM-aanvraag hebben we als doel nieuwe manieren te verkennen, onderzoeken en valideren om boeken digitaal te presenteren in fysieke boekwinkels. Dit projectvoorstel is een initiatief van het PublishingLab van de Hogeschool van Amsterdam en wordt uitgevoerd in samenwerking met boekhandel Athenaeum Roeterseiland Amsterdam, De Nieuwe Boekhandel Amsterdam, Boekhandel Voorhoeve Hilversum, AKO Nederland en de Koninklijke Boekverkopersbond (KBB). Het onderzoek wordt begeleid vanuit de lectoraten Crossmedia en Netwerkcultuur aan de Hogeschool van Amsterdam. Het project beoogt de volgende uitkomsten: - Overzicht van de mogelijkheden voor het digitaal presenteren van het boek in winkels. - Onderzoek naar wensen en behoeften van klanten van boekhandels ten aanzien van de presentatie van boeken in boekwinkels. - Uitvoeren van 1 of 2 experiment(en) bij deelnemende boekhandels. - Rapportage van uitkomsten experimenten. - Schriftelijk advies aan mkb-retailers en vakpublicatie over de wijze van digitaal presenteren van boeken., - Een prototype van een innovatieve wijze van presenteren dat het schriftelijk advies onderbouwt. - Bijeenkomst in de vorm van een presentatie aan mkb’ers en studenten en belanghebbende partijen in het vak over de uitkomsten van het onderzoek. - Het opstarten van een consortium waarin meer onderzoek gedaan wordt naar innovatie in de boekhandel.
