In the latest SPARC Open Access Newsletter Peter Suber talks about the use of Google ads as a way of supporting electronic journals. There often has been a prejudice against advertising on scholarly sites, the perception that ads - particularly those from Google - somehow lessen the integrity of a site. However, every site - especially scholarly open access e-journals - needs a way to pay the bills. My own experience with Google ads on a couple of my blogs indicate that advertising can be done in an effective way and produce a decent revenue stream.

Of course, a lot of Web sites and a lot of blogs exist primarily as a way of producing income for the publisher through advertising. Then again, a lot of print publishing serve the very same purpose: generating income for the publisher. Librarians certainly know that is true for many scholarly publishers, hence the need for open access online publishing. Yet, I no longer think that placing ads on open access e-journals is a means of “selling out”.

I would caution open access publishers to think carefully about the placement of their ads and how ad programs, such as Google adsense, operate. The default color scheme and appearance of Google ads are rather ugly. There are a number of options that allow publishers to slightly change the appearance of ads. Also, publishers have control over the location of the ads and, to a large degree, the format of the ads. Also, publishers can change the location or remove the ads from their site at any point.

The colors of the ads should blend well with the color scheme of the e-journal itself. In one sense, this makes the ads less intrusive. However, in another sense, it also makes it more likely that a user will click on the ads. Open access publishers need to weigh carefully this balance, though it’s likely that regular readers are not going to click on an e-journal’s advertisement. The advertising clicks will like come from non-regular readers who stumble across the site through an Internet search engine.

There are ways of highly optimizing Web sites for advertising that may result in a site generating a thousand dollars of income per month, just from Google ads. It’s unlikely that an open access e-journal will produce this type of revenue. Sites with high ad revenue often are plastered with ads to the point that the site becomes unreadable. Certainly, not a goal for e-journals. But careful arrangement of the ads should generate a revenue that offsets some of the costs. And for most open access publishing, every bit of funding helps.

E-journals and other open access scholarly sites that are considering advertising should read the blogs that specialize in these topics. One very helpful blog is problogger, which has the best information on the Web for generating income online. While the information on that site is focused on blogs, it can equally be applied to non-blog sites. Indeed, while I’m on the topic of blogs, any e-journal that is considering Google’s adsense should also considering adopting a blog platform, such as WordPress, for managing the e-journal itself. The customization of WordPress for an e-journal is a topic for another post, another day.

I’ve recently finished reading an entire semester’s worth of entries of the blog for the course History 696: Introduction to History and New Media, taught by Mills Kelly at George Mason University. It looked like a very interesting course, conducted as a graduate seminar with students required to post entries on the course blog. Not only is it a good example of the use of a blog in the classroom, it offers some interesting insights on digital scholarship as well as pointers to worthwhile web sites.

From one of the grad students:

Digital scholarship becomes exciting for its makers in a more selfish way as well. It allows the scholar to present more of his or her research and ideas. Not in some tacked on, rarely looked at appendix (everyone knows you don’t even need your appendix!), but in an integrated, and, consequently, more relevant fashion. Both textually and graphically, the medium creates a facility for transmitting knowledge which other forms lack, and provides a freedom of presentation to the scholar previously unavailable. It also upsets the hierarchy of publishing, opening access to new and untapped audiences, while encouraging old ones to experiment with new forms. While its definition is far from solidified, it is clear digital scholarship has promise.

The line that really stands out in that statement on digital scholarship is “Both textually and graphically, the medium creates a facility for transmitting knowledge which other forms lack, and provides a freedom of presentation to the scholar previously unavailable.”

A look at some of the other grad courses that history students at GMU are taking, such as “Digital History Documentary Filmmaking” and “Creating Digital History”, should make one wonder what type of information resources and technology support services these future faculty will be needing and expecting from their universities.

(Catching up on my reading)

Acquiring Copyright Permission to Digitize and Provide Open Access to Books reports on CMU’s efforts to obtain copyright permissions to digiize books published after 1923. As with most CLIR reports, it’s an interesting study. CMU was most successful with targeted, specialized collections such as in their rare book collection. Two-thirds of the copyright holders in that collection granted permission.

The report details the process used and the costs. Permissions were easier to obtain in targeted collections than for larger sets of works, such as in CMU’s Million Book Project. CMU found that permissions were more likely to be granted from special publishers, authors and estates, museums, galleries, and scholarly associations. Commericial publishers, including university presses, were less likely to grant permission. University presses often reported that copyright reverted back to the author after the work went out-of-print. In other cases,publishers defined out-of-print differently than libraries since publishers saw potential in print-on-demand for titles were no longer being printed.

Overall, it’s a very useful report on copyright practices related to digitizing book collections.