Too many topics, too little time

Cornell launches OA university press for books.

Open Access News notes today that Cornell University has launched Internet-First University Press which will make digital texts available online and offer fee-based print-on-demand services. From the press release:

Just when the recording, music and publishing industries are going all-out to stop people from making their products available on the Internet, a new publishing venture at Cornell University is challenging traditional scholarly publishing by taking the opposite approach: Make the full text of a new book freely available on the Internet, and give readers the option to buy the printed book. The new “open access” publisher, known as Internet-First University Press, launched recently with a catalog announcing four original manuscripts and several titles that have been out of print. Soon to be added are monographs, Cornell graduate student theses and, eventually, an online scholarly journal. The project also is publishing multimedia materials, including videos and collections of photographs.

[Kairosnews – A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy]

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1998 we were supposed to do this, 2000, i have a letter authorizing money for it, money never was appropriated, and 2003, well, someone else has started to do it. our model will be released in august, but it seems sort of moot.