silvas academi books: a bold solution for open scientific publication;
and a model resource for scholarly communication
The basis for scientific research and teaching is knowledge shared within and without “the groves of the Academy.” For the sciences, this knowledge is shared through peer-reviewed journals and books. New developments in information technologies promise a fundamental improvement in the mode of scientific communication. The Public Library of Science has created an opening for advanced informatics and open access to scientific journals. But scholarly book publishing today remains hostage to technologies and practices that were first developed at the beginning of the 20th Century.
Science book publishing should serve two communities: the community of students hungry for new knowledge and often with limited ability to pay for this, and the community of scholars that need avenues for their scholarly output—a means to bring years of research to the academy for critique and, where deserved, for acclaim. Instead, university presses serve two other communities: their own business needs and the demands of retail book selling. All of their business practices reflect production models that predate digital information flows. After years of work on a major project, a scholar might spend more years simply trying to place her work with a university press, only to wait still years more for this to be printed, and then find that her work has had little or no marketing and is soon out of print and again unavailable. Students go to the bookstore and find that the paperback books they need for their classes may cost them more than the fees they pay to attend college. And the books they find reflect theories and fieldwork that are half a decade old on the day the book first sold.
Print-on-demand technologies can help academic presses solve their inventory problems, but will these new efficiencies result in lower prices or better service? When peer-review is a closed system managed by the press, who can tell how publishing decisions are made? And how can this process ever improve? With more than 125 academic presses in the United States, this aggregate engine for academic publishing represents a huge investment in scholarly communication. Yet, simultaneously, it represents an enormous waste of human effort, resources, and time. There are emerging informatics that can help existing publishers to build new business models built on and with open-source IT, but these need to be further developed and demonstrated. This is the goal of silvas academi books.
silvas academi books is looking to create a model end-to-end science book publishing and distribution system based on open source software, print-on-demand technology, and community-based peer-review (ePeerReview). All of the technology resources that silvas academi books will be using will also be made available for other academic publishers through the a shared portal on the National Science Digital Library. The goal is help the entire field of scholarly book publishing for science find new information technologies and business practices that bring this enterprise into the digital age of shared information.
Looking at the desired outcomes for scholarly communication in the social sciences, a number of goals can be found. silvas academi books will seek information technologies that foster these goals.

silvas academi books fulfills all the goals for scholarly communication:

• rewards and fosters scholarly excellence;
• supports a diversity of voices within a scholarly debate;
• makes new knowledge available quickly;
• brings new knowledge to a world of students at the lowest possible cost—free when possible.

silvas academi books builds a new process and business model for academic publications:

• brings digital community-reputation systems to academic publishing;
• builds open-source publishing technologies for digital asset management, intellectual property management, and author-publisher communication;
• promotes open access knowledge practices;
• leverages print-on-demand technologies

silvas academi books solves the predicaments of current scholarly publishing:

• Best practices in peer-review and peer-acclaim systems (ePeerReview);
• Open community-based review and commentary;
• No unnecessary gate-keeping: all books are published, quality books achieve distinction and honors;
• Efficiencies result in lower consumer prices: no cartelized pricing, and no legacy overhead to pay;
• Minimal time to publication and always-in-print;
• On-line marketing through active web-presence and partnerships with Google and others;
• Integration into NSDL metadata layer and fine-level granularity searching across entire corpus.