Coming in March: Open Access: What You Need to Know Now

I am delighted to announce that my new book (and first book from a “real publisher” in eight years) will be out in March–and is available for preorder now.

Open Access: What You Need to Know Now offers a concise overview of OA in a 80-page, 8.5×11″ ALA Editions Special Report. Here’s what the order page says:

Academic libraries routinely struggle to afford access to expensive journals, and patrons may not be able to obtain every scholarly paper they need. Is Open Access (OA) the answer? In this ALA Editions Special Report, Crawford helps readers understand what OA is (and isn’t), as he concisely

  • Analyzes the factors that have brought us to the current state of breakdown, including the skyrocketing costs of science, technology, engineering, and medicine (STEM) journals; consolidation of publishers and diminishing price competition; and shrinking library budgets
  • Summarizes the benefits and drawbacks of different OA models, such as “Green,” “Gold,” Gratis,” “Libre,” and various hybrid forms
  • Discusses ways to retain peer-review, and methods for managing OA in the library, including making OA scholarly publishing available to the general public

Addressing the subject from the library perspective while taking a realistic view of corporate interests, Crawford presents a coherent review of what Open Access is today and what it may become.

I believe this book fills a need–not only in the library community but beyond. It’s a reasonably fast read but also a set of resources for further use.

Dorothea Salo, Peter Suber and Charles W. Bailey, Jr., all deserve credit for reading the draft version, offering honest suggestions and criticism and leading to a much better final version. Dorothea in particular was usefully frank, as I’d expect.

The book is available now for preorder. It costs $45.

Creative Commons License
This work by Walt Crawford is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

This entry was posted on Friday, February 4th, 2011 at 8:14 am and is filed under Books and publishing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Responses to “Coming in March: Open Access: What You Need to Know Now”

  1. Steven Kaye says:
    February 4, 2011 at 2:50 pm

    Would you recommend it for business researchers? I know a *little* about open access in business (mostly the existence of management research as part of SSRN)

  2. walt says:
    February 4, 2011 at 2:56 pm

    It’s designed as a concise overview of what’s important about OA, issues, controversies–and ways to find out more about it. I think it’s appropriate for business researchers, yes. (I’m biased, of course: I wrote it.) I think it’s appropriate for scientists and researchers, even though it’s less likely to reach them.

  3. will manley says:
    February 4, 2011 at 3:30 pm

    Congrats, Walt. You are an excellent writer. This is an area I definitely need to learn much more about. I’m looking forward to getting my copy and reading it.