The on-going crisis in Scholarly Communications is no longer breaking news. We all are aware of the sky-rocketing costs of journals, the imploding market for scholarly monographs, the struggles to develop sustainable business models for open access publications, and the paralysis induced by the lack of an agreed-upon process for peer review of born digital scholarship. In the face of this dismal situation, the folks at the The Institute for the Future of the Book and Rice University have been busily planning two new initiatives, both of which address head-on many of our shared problems.

Rice University recently announced that it will re-start its press, but that it will no longer sell printed copies of its books. Instead, it will provide print-on-demand services for its monographs. It is also committed to exploring born-digital scholarship designed for reading on the screen. Its linkage with their Connexions Project will be particularly interesting to follow, as it suggests a more fluid continuum among learning objects, course textbooks, and digital scholarship. Details about this initiative are included in the press release.

A more radical approach comes from USC's Institute for the Future of the Book which recently announced the formation of the Media Commons, a scholarly network that will focus on Media Studies. As presently imagined, this will include:

• electronic "monographs"  which will allow editors and authors to work together in the development of ideas that surface in blogs and other discussions, as well as in the design, production, publicizing, and review of individual and collaborative projects;
• electronic "casebooks," which will bring together writing by many authors on a single subject -- a single television program, for instance -- along with pedagogical and other materials, allowing the casebooks to serve as continually evolving textbooks;
• electronic "journals," in which editors bring together article-length texts on a range of subjects that are somehow interrelated;
• electronic reference works, in which a community collectively produces, in a mode analogous to current wiki projects, authoritative resources for research in the field;
• electronic forums, including both threaded discussions and a wealth of blogs, through which a wide range of media scholars, practitioners, policy makers, and users are able to discuss - in real time - media events and texts. These nodes will promote ongoing discourse and interconnection among readers and writers, and will allow for the germination and exploration of the ideas and arguments of more sustained pieces of scholarly writing.

The Institute's website contains both the announcement of the Media Commons and a nice summary of intial reactions to this announcement.

In thinking about how to differentiate these two projects, I asked Ben Vershbow from the Institute how he would distinguish their project from the Rice initiative, and he wrote the following:

"It's important ... to note how the two initiatives differ — and I think they differ significantly. Rice is moving to an all-digital model in order to make scholarly materials simultaneously more accessible and less expensive. This is a terrific aim and it looks like they might be able to pull it off (Connexions is a very robust platform). But the scholarly materials themselves (in spite of some nice affordances such as authors being able to update them, or students/teachers being able to create customized collections of modules) are still rather conventional, as is the process for reviewing and vetting them.

MediaCommons, on the other hand, while it will certainly produce concrete scholarly products in a variety of forms, is much more about the process of scholarship. That is why we are calling it a scholarly network and not a press. The point is to foreground the conversations among scholars and to forge new conversations with the public, and to make the products of both universally accessible and fully plugged into the multi-mediated, networked modes of contemporary intellectual life. A core part of this will be a re-thinking of peer review, turning it into an open process of critical engagement, rather than a closed-doors gatekeeping function. For more on that specific issue, read this essay by Kathleen Fitzpatrick that we published a few weeks back:  http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2006/06/on_the_future_of_peer_review_i.html "

We'll be watching both of these projects with great interest to see if they can effect the sort of transformations that we all have recognized as necessary, but have struggled to operationalize. Stay tuned.