2 New Digital Models Promise Academic Publishing for Profit

Jennifer Howard published an article in the October 2 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education discussing a couple of recent innovative models of disseminating monographs in digital format. One model concerns the publisher Bloomsbury Academic (discussed in this blog on 10 September in this blog) that will be making all its imprints freely accessible as open access. The other initiative concerns Tizra Inc., an e-publishing service provider, with whom the Association of American University Presses has recently made a deal. “Tizra provides what is sometimes called ‘agile software’ or ‘software as a service.’ The company's Web site describes Tizra Publisher as a ‘Web-based software service that lets content owners create branded commerce Web sites from existing content, with complete control over branding, merchandising, and sales terms’ — a sort of glorified Movable Type for publishers. Content — university-press monographs, for instance—is hosted on Tizra's servers, but how it looks and how it is distributed are up to those providing the content.”

The complete Chronicle article is available here.