How better to mark the arrival of a much-discussed report on scholarly publishing and technology than to post the document online, in full Web 2.0 glory?
“University Publishing in a Digital Age” — a report released a few weeks ago by Ithaka, a nonprofit group that promotes IT in academe — argues that campus administrators have been slow to react to an uptick in “informal scholarly publication” made possible by the Web. The paper has sparked a good bit of discussion, so the University of Michigan’s Scholarly Publishing Office decided to put it online and solicit public commentary.
The digital copy of the report was created with a tool called CommentPress. The software — which was released the same week as the Ithaka paper — lets Web surfers annotate a common text by creating the digital equivalent of margin notes. CommentPress was designed by the Institute for the Future of the Book, an academic center run by the University of Southern California. —Brock Read
