Now It Can Be Said

We’ve reached a general agreement with Wipf & Stock Publishers to handle the print side of our Disseminary publications. That’ll include Quadriga and Hoopoe works, and possibly also (edited?) transcripts from seminars.

We’ll make the arrangement formal and legal as soon as we nail down the licensing language.

Scholarly Publishing Online

Alex Halavais links to a fascinating conference on Scholarly Publishing on the Web, with plenty of thinky papers and presentations that I wish I could have known about and gone to. Alex’s notes mention a compelling presentation by Stephen Harnad, in which he mentions research that shows that “Articles available online are cited 336% more often” (with the same embedded link to Steve Lawrence’s paper). This is why we’re building the Disseminary; this is what we’re about, and it’s exciting to see that other people are on the same wavelength. From Alex’s notes on the discussion: “In the case of Napster, the authors were wanting to be paid and the technology inhibited this, while in the case of academics, the author wants to give away report, but is blocked by copyright and publishing contracts. It is the inverse of Napster.” Of course, getting paid even the token amounts we can offer here will accelerate the process. . . .

Disseminating Learning

“Technology is available to develop either independence and learning or bureaucracy and teaching.
The planning of new educational institutions ought not to begin with the administrative goals of a principal or president, or with the teaching goals of a professional educator, or with the learning goals of any hypothetical class of people. It must not start with the question, ‘What should someone learn?’ but with the question, ‘What kinds of things and people might learners want to be in contact with in order to learn?’ ”
— Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, 77-78

Little Things

Yesterday I added favicons for the Disseminary and for my own blog, and a description of the license under which Disseminary works will be published. The license comes down to this: a Creative Commons “Attribution - Noncommercial - NoDerivs” license, with a stipulation that the Disseminary may arrange with a publisher to print copies of Disseminary works (with concomitant royalties for the author).