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For students with print impairments, e-books offer great potential to remove barriers to information. However, for various reasons, not all e-books are fully accessible. Significant variability exists between different platforms and titles. To benchmark e-book accessibility, a group of library and disability professionals across the UK higher education sector organized a crowdsourced e-book accessibility audit, using simple criteria to capture end-user experiences. The audit can act as a framework for librarians and e-book providers to discuss accessibility and effect improvements. This audit was of 275 e-books from 65 publishers across 44 platforms, resulting in an interactive spreadsheet on the project website and individual feedback reports for each platform. Most of the volunteer auditors had little accessibility expertise so a byproduct of the process was training to introduce key accessibility concepts and support for those using the audit tool. This paper explores the process, including key findings from a follow-up questionnaire for testers. The results indicate increased awareness of e-book accessibility and empathy for disabled learners and an appetite for further training, in particular using e-books with screen reading and text-to-speech software. The study suggests crowdsourced research can be highly effective on multiple levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite electronic book (e-book) piracy being viewed by many rightsholders as the greatest contemporary challenge to the publishing industry, there is little research evaluating different anti-piracy methods, and explaining how they work. This paper explores the technological methods that United Kingdom and United States publishers, and their representative bodies, are using to tackle the growing challenge of e-book piracy. Through interviews with industry experts (including consultants, publishers and representatives) and publishing case studies, this paper brings together knowledge previously published and considered separately. The systems considered include The Publishers Association Copyright Infringement Portal, and Digital Rights Management in its various forms. Through these systems, we can reveal a lack of nuanced understanding in the motivations and methods of illegal file sharing, which have led to unsuccessful blanket solutions to a complex problem. By teasing out these problems, this paper will act as a point of reference for current anti-piracy measures, and consider the future options for an industry increasingly using the World Wide Web to distribute content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

June 2012 saw publication of the Finch report into expanding access to published research findings, the UK Government's response to the report and the issuing of a revised policy on open access publication of research papers by the UK Research Councils. All appear to be driving the UK towards the world's most rigorous adoption of open access publication of publicly funded research outputs. This article looks at the potentially profound consequences of these steps for publishers, librarians and researchers in the UK, and for scholarly communications in general, not least for the centuries-old model of peer review. It concludes that the success of the policy will depend to a considerable extent on the availability of funding and mechanisms to support it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a study - overseen by representatives of the publishing, library, and research funder communities in the UK - investigating the drivers, costs, and benefits of potential ways to increase access to scholarly journals. It identifies five different but realistic scenarios for moving towards that end over the next five years, including gold and green open access, moves towards national licensing, publisher-led delayed open access, and transactional models. It then compares and evaluates the benefits as well as the costs and risks for the UK. The scenarios, and the modelling on which they are based, amount to a benefit-cost analysis to help in appraising policy options. Our conclusion is that policymakers should encourage the use of existing subject and institutional repositories, but avoid pushing for reductions in embargo periods, which might put at risk the sustainability of the underlying scholarly publishing system. They should also promote and facilitate a transition to gold open access, while seeking to ensure that the average level of publication fees does not exceed c.?2.000; that the rate in the UK of open access publication is broadly in step with the rest of the world; and that total payments to publishers from UK universities do not rise as a consequence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides the results of a two-year investigation into the use of e-journals by the UK research community. Log analysis, questionnaires, interviews, and observation were used to collect the information. The results are presented in a FAQ format to make the key findings accessible. The main findings are that journals have become central to most disciplines, and that the e-form has become the prime means of access. The results for history suggest that the old scholarly communication mantras (scientists primarily communicate through articles, historians through monographs) are rapidly breaking down. Indeed, all researchers seem addicted to journal content. Research without this resource now seems unthinkable; journals are a researcher's lifeblood. Gateway services, hugely popular in science, are re-intermediating the broken chain between publisher and reader; they are the new librarians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an overview of the history of the Scholarly Digital Editions, a small academic publisher focused on producing electronic versions of scholarly books. Topics considered include the sale of electronic texts on CD-ROMs, the advent of the World Wide Web, and the author's work on the Canterbury Tales Project, scholarly research which started with the Hengwrt manuscript held at the National Library of Wales of Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." Scholarly Digital Editions was founded in 2000 to publish the findings of the Canterbury Tales Project and similar scholarly works.