Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy is now available as a networked object with social features. Readers can comment directly on the book’s paragraphs, go to the object’s blog, and subscribe to the comments feed.
The sponsoring entity, MediaCommons Press, launched earlier this month, responds directly to the crisis in academic publishing limned by Stephen Greenblatt in May 2002.1 From my vantage, this is a bold and correct step forward, one realization of the many possiiblities afforded by network tools.
MediaCommons Press is an unprecedented project with serious teeth, and it’s about to bite the academic publishing crisis right in the ass.
Notes
1 Seventeen months later, which is lightning speed in academia, historian James M. McPherson asked his colleagues to consider this same problem. McPherson lucidly and succinctly characterizes the origins of the academic publishing crisis. ↩