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Friday, June 29, 2007
Ohio State University Press’ Open Access Initiative
OSUP’s Open Access Initiative is quite impressive, even if their vociferous insistence that they’re not like us stings:
The mission of The Ohio State University Press is to disseminate the best scholarship as widely as possible. Towards that end, we are making the complete texts of certain books available from our website. You will need the free Adobe Reader or some other PDF-enabled program to read the text.
All titles available this way, whether old or new, have gone through the exact same peer review process as our printed books. Any book that carries our imprint—no matter what medium is being used—has been approved by our Editorial Board after a thorough vetting process.
As you click to read the books, note that almost all are prefaced by something like this:
This title is no longer available in a traditional print edition. Nevertheless, the following PDF files contain the complete text of the book and may be used for any non-commercial purpose. The text remains © 1982 by the author.
In an economy of reputation like ours, it only makes sense to have out-of-print scholarship available online. (This point is not lost on regular readers, even if the link to John Holbo’s post on the matter is.) This is especially true of works like James Phelan’s Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology, first printed all the way back in 1997.
I tip my hat to Ralph Luker, who tipped his to The Long Eighteenth.