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The article describes the revolutionary new ways of communicating the written word when moving from the Medieval to Modern period in Europe, primarily the use of paper and moveable typeface printing and how these catalysed important cultural developments. A similar revolution has taken place in the last 50 years with the development of the internet. The article looks at how scientific publishing has changed with electronic publishing, including the development of Open Access. The journal Heritage Science is placed into this context. Especially important for scientific journals in an era when anyone can post anything on a webpage, is maintaining standards through high quality refereeing which distinguishes formal scientific literature from informal websites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper takes as a starting point a recent EU Commission report on scientific publishing in Europe (Dewatripont et al 2006). In Norway, where a new system of documentation of scientific publishing was introduced in 2005, several of the recommendations in this report have already been anticipated. The Norwegian documentation system which has already proven controversial in parts of the research community and lacks parallells in other Nordic countries like Denmark and Sweden, is expected to have considerable consequences on Norwegian publishing patterns, such as increased use of electronic journals and of open standards such as Open Access and Open Source (Vaagan 2005). As e-publishing grows as part of the process of globalization, there is increasing awareness in many countries of ethical concerns in science and in scientific publishing, including the need for public access to publicly-funded research results. In this perspective, the paper links open standards in scientific communication and publishing to the principle of universality of science and to information ethics priorities identified by Capurro (2004). Qualitative methodology is used with critical & typical case sampling (Patton 2002) of key policy documents as well as international articles on e-publishing 2000-2005, especially from DLib magazine. In conclusion, it is suggested that open standards such as Open Access and Open Source are likely to increase in scientific publishing in the future, both in Norway and in the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most European e-book markets are currently being created. Publishers are going through a transitional phase and together with the printed content creators becoming the designers of e-content. The integration of technology into business processes is becoming an important business challenge together with the creation of new publishing products. All this is possible only through mutual work of other sectors in the creative industries. The paper tries to show the possibilities a small publisher has and identify the obstacles to the development of such markets. It discusses the advantages of a traditional publisher compared to new entrants, the skills that a traditional publisher develops and implements. One of the obstacles for the development of a small market is a high VAT rate for e-books throughout Europe. A special emphasis will be put on the Croatian market, which upon the entrance to the European Union had to apply a new tax policy regarding books. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Editech 2011 conference identified that publishers need to follow new paths and experiment more rapidly in all the areas of business related to a growing number of new digital publishing activities. Most important they need to rethink all the relationships actually in place with all the other factors in the publishing value chain and then radically reinvent their role in the quickly changing digital and ebook businesses. It is clear that now most of the changes are driven by the big three Google, Amazon, Apple and the publishers are following. However, especially in Europe the publishers have different approaches based on a brief review of selected key papers presented from different countries and sectors of the digital publishing industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]