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Another UCL interviewee felt that 'most people appear to rely on
contacts or reconnections, such as one's PhD supervisor, to get published'.
Kingsley (2009) has noted in her doctoral thesis, in which she interviewed
academics at the Australian National University (ANU) and the
University of New South Wales, that many researchers were unfamiliar
with recent developments in digital scholarship and e-publishing, and
that researchers often continued to reflect publishing frameworks from
their own early research experiences, thereby giving advice to current
doctoral students which was largely out of date.
A case study of the ANU E-Press
The potential for more effective distribution of university scholarship
can be seen in the following example. Professor Oskar Spate's award-
winning book The Spanish Lake (1979) was a critical and commercial
success for the then ANU Press, but after it went out of print copies
soon became difficult to find. By 2005 there were only two copies of The
Spanish Lake listed on Antiquarian Book Exchange (ABE), both at
prices over $400. Subsequently, the ANU E-Press published the topic
free online in 2004 and the Spanish government supported a Spanish
translation, El Lago EspaƱol , in 2006, which saw just over 28,000
complete PDF downloads in 2008. There is surely no contest in the
ability to distribute scholarship in the new e-press frameworks. The
costs are relatively small in the totality of library or information
budgets, let alone the university as a whole (Steele, 2008).
ANU E-Press titles are freely available in HTML, PDF and mobile
device formats and are discoverable through Google Book Search and
Google Scholar. A total of 8643 print-on-demand copies were sold
between January and December 2008. Since the E-Press's monographs
are downloadable free, around the world, high print sales were not the
original aim, but clearly these are growing. Annual ANU E-Press
statistics for PDF and HTML downloads for 2005-8 were:
2005
381,740
2006
745,288
2007
1,252,735
2008
2,747,445
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