Real examples of library-based publishing

At the ETD 2006 conference last week, I got to hear Jim Neal of Columbia speak. He mentioned Columbia's publishing project, EPIC. Coincidentally, Kate Wittenberg, the director of EPIC wrote an editorial piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed recently stating that while professionals in scholarly communication have been going about business as usual, "students have been quietly revolutionizing the discovery and use of information." She looks at some strategies for moving scholarly communication forward: good for her and for EPIC. I am definitely going to be paying attention to this organization.

At the conference, I spoke with some peers about the state of open access journals for academic libraries. Despite pockets of support in the profession, overall, we aren't doing a very good job. I'm preparing an article and would like to publish it open access, but I don't have many options. I did find that one journal that had been defunct for awhile, the Journal of Electronic Publishing, has been reinvigorated by another library-based publishing operation, the Scholarly Publishing Office at the University of Michigan. I was particularly thrilled to see the following paragraph on the about page of JEP:

"JEP is published by the Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO), a unit of the University of Michigan University Library. SPO is committed to the concept of library-based scholarly publishing. Indeed, the SPO believes that this is a necessary next step for academic libraries, as the university takes control not only of the creation of information, but its dissemination. To do that, the SPO has been unstinting in its effort to provide low-cost, scalable mechanisms for electronic publication and distribution of journals and scholarly databases."