CDRS’s Role as Promoter and Disseminator of Columbia Research
September 30, 2009
| Online scholarship
http://dangerouscitizens.columbia.edu/
Last week’s ITHAKA meeting on Sustainable Scholarship brought together
librarians and University Press staff to talk about the challenges and
opportunities facing those of us working in the scholarly
communication arena. In a presentation about the University of
Minnesota’s innovative Quadrant initiative, Douglas Armato, the Press
Director, spoke about the inherent difficulty that University presses
have in demonstrating their relevance to their parent institutions,
given that their work by its nature, promotes the research of authors
from other institutions.
The Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, with its new
“adjunct” forms of publishing, has none of these constraints, and
indeed its goal is to support and promote the peer-reviewed work of
Columbia researchers. It does this on a large scale with its
development of Columbia’s repository, Academic Commons, which makes
accessible and preserves a wide range of content from journal articles
and play scripts, to working papers and conference proceedings. CDRS
also provides and supports publishing platforms for Columbia-based
journals. The online version of Dangerous Citizens represents a
further way to support and disseminate Columbia research. In
creating an e-version of Neni Pangouria’s book CDRS is piloting a new
partnership between a University Press (Fordham) which applies all the
rigor of peer review to selection of its list, and an institutional
publishing arm (CDRS) that then promotes the book by reconceiving it
as an online, non-linear publication.
Back to sustainability—how sustainable is this model? It’s a fair
question and one that we’re exploring. Part of the pilot process is
to calculate the costs of putting this book online and then estimating
how much of this work we can undertake with current resources. And
we’ll be looking at ways to fund this work—possibly from small
internal and external grants. How great for example to create a fund
that would support a competitive process for junior Columbia faculty
to work with us and their presses, to put out an online book (not a
book online) in tandem with the publication of their print monograph.
Stay tuned!
—Patricia Renfro, Deputy University Librarian
Tags: academic commons, collaboration, journals, scholarly
communication, university press