Thursday, March 6, 2014

De Gruyter Open

I just got an email from these people and I'm tempted to see whether they might publish my Tractatus book. Here's what they say:
De Gruyter Open is part of De Gruyter (www.degruyter.com) an established scholarly publisher with more than 260 years of distinguished history. With our Open Access Books program we aim to offer unrestricted access to high quality, innovative and peer-reviewed research to all readers, as well as to help scholars reach audiences on a global scale.

We seek submissions for monographs, edited volumes and reference works. If you are interested, please fill in our book proposal form (www.degruyteropen.com/you/book-author/form/) and send it back to me by email to Anna.Michalska@degruyteropen.com.

De Gruyter Open cares about the quality of its publications, therefore all books are subject to scrupulous peer-review as well as language and copy editing. Our Open Access Books are available through De Gruyter's publishing platform, libraries, full text repositories and distributors such as Amazon. Each title is also offered as a print version, and authors receive complimentary copies and royalties from print sales. For details on what professional assistance we offer our authors, please visit www.degruyteropen.com/you/book-author/about/.
As I understand it, they make books freely available online in a professional-looking format while also paying authors royalties on any copies sold (to people or libraries that want a hard copy) and peer-reviewing the work so that you can put it on your CV in a way that you can't when you just post a pdf of something online. It sounds great.

Is there a downside that I'm overlooking?

4 comments:

  1. Off topic, but apropos publishing, I ran into your name following this post from Leiter on a journal that might (but the jury is still out) be a scam:

    http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2014/03/review-of-contemporary-philosophy-whats-the-story.html

    As former contributer, they are also using your name: http://www.addletonacademicpublishers.com/contributors-rcp

    PS: Apropos of the article you printed in Review of Contempoary Philosophy (which I like - scam journal or not), it will be VERY exciting see if Heidegger's "Black books" contains the alleged notebook on Wittgenstein...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks. Yes, a notebook by Heidegger on Wittgenstein would be interesting to read.

    I don't think that journal is a scam, but it is odd. I had that paper on my (now defunct) website and hadn't managed to find a publisher when I got an email from the blue asking if they could publish it. So I accepted the offer. I didn't have to pay anything to get them to publish it (unlike an even more obscure publication of mine in a journal that wanted me to subscribe after they had accepted the paper for publication--I refused and they published it anyway, but that felt like a scam). Unfortunately I have never seen a copy of the supposedly published paper, and I don't know anyone who has. Requests through inter-library loan draw a blank. Michael Kremer seems convinced that the journal really exists, though, and he is unlikely to be deceived about that.

    ReplyDelete
  3. the only time i've ever really 'used' a fortified online publication of a book (ie. not say google books or a pdf, but a site presenting the book usually run by a publisher) is, say, for one that UC press put online that was out of print and far too expensive to buy used. but these sites always strike me as excessively un-useable. i would much rather have a pdf than anything else save an actual book, and those seem to have an easier time traveling in the world, anyway.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks, j. Maybe I should just leave it as it is.

    ReplyDelete