0.25 Removable type  (Page 3/8)

This digital press operates as a traditional press, but only to a point. Manuscripts are solicited, reviewed, edited, and resubmitted for final approval by an editorial board of prominent scholars. Rather than waiting for months for a printer to make a bound book, the press runs digital files through Connexions for automatic formatting and population with high-resolution images, audio and video, and Web links. The content of Rice University Press titles are viewable online for free or, through a partnership with on-demand printer QOOP, can be ordered as printed books in any desired format, from softbound black-and-white on inexpensive paper to leather-bound, full-color hardbacks on high-gloss paper. Another distinctive facet is that authors published by Rice University Press retain the copyrights for their works, in accordance with Connexions' licensing agreement with Creative Commons. Additionally, because Connexions is open-source, authors will be able to update or amend their work, easily creating revised editions of their books. All changes are noted and time stamped in the Connexions platform.

The much reduced costs of publishing, the relatively quick time from approval of a manuscript to its appearance as a web object and a print-on-demand book, and the ease of revision all contribute to the perception of something that is cheap and dirty. It is cheap. But the converse of this riposte, that the expense, time consumption, and narrowing purview of the print press more rigorously assures high quality, does not necessarily hold. This reaction is more a product, I believe, of a sheltered bias, which has some degree of merit: digital technologies can (rapidly) produce sloppy, unsubstantiated, and erroneous information, and they do.

But some recent developments with the Rice Press, specifically its partnering with the NINES community, offer more substantive insight into the possibilities, and unique contributions, a digital press can offer to scholarship and scholarly communication by aggressively adopting the tools and media of a robust digital environment, and help to dispel the characterization of “digital-as-catch-basin.”

There are specific, concrete goals that the collaboration of the Rice University Press and NINES expect to achieve. NINES (The Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship) is most likely familiar to everyone at this conference. Two salient goals that have guided NINES are integral to the Rice Press partnership. NINES set out to develop an institutional mechanism for aggregating and peer-reviewing high quality online scholarly resources in nineteenth-century studies. The Rossetti , Whitman , and Blake Archives , Romantic Circles , and Romanticism on the Net are today highly regarded projects that remain at the core of NINES as it has expanded to include hundreds of thousands of additional objects relating to nineteenth-century studies. Secondly, NINES was conceived as a model for online scholarly research and authoring/publishing in nineteenth-century studies but is also extensible to other humanities online communities. NINES works to integrate digital scholarship across disciplines, universities, presses, and collections by organizing them around interdisciplinary scholarly interests and periods.