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Whoooo! I just passed 1500 downloads of my coauthored book! And while that is happy news it really has me thinking about a discussion I had on here yesterday about scholarship and access. (quick plug before I continue https://prism.ucalgary.ca/handle/1880/112216 for anyone that might be interested)
@BA_Friedman and @WDMills1992 mentioned they wished there was more Eastern military history that was easy to access. I popped up and mentioned African military history and the Journal of Chinese Military History but as we quickly noted, none of us had access to a lot of it.
And this isn't necessarily a critique of say Brill, they are a business and they need to survive and all that, but it does mean that so much good and useful scholarship remains behind paywalls that the average person (or average practitioner) can't get at. This isn't a new...
critique, but publishing with @UCalgaryPress really hit home to me what a huge difference that access or lack thereof makes. UCalgary's press is subsidized by the Canadian Government but in return they have to offer Open Access versions of the books they publish. I knew that...
going in but didn't think about it. But now... wow there is so much going on in my brain about it. First of all, nothing I've ever written has touched 1500 people as far as I know. That alone is amazing and there is so much potential for more people yet! But even moreso...
as some of you know, part of my side work is working with African PME institutions, helping develop curricula and faculty so that there are sustainable institutions for developing officers in our partner states. One of our main challenges tends not to be access to tech or things
like that- what I like to note is that with physical materials, a stick, and the ground you can teach quite a lot! No, what we tend to lack is access to those very resources that allow the teaching of PME. Those stacks of books you have? Those are expensive and hard to come by.
Access to those databases? Well as we saw yesterday those are a challenge even over here! So how do we do manage to introduce learning materials to our partners? The easiest way is Open Access. I will say @aupress has been invaluable as have other PME presses.
But even these can be hit or miss on access. But now, man now I am really thinking of the kind of reach I can have and good I can do with Open Access, especially after such an amazing experience with @UCalgaryPress. Hopefully some of you all will think about where your work...
could go and what it could do if more work was published in these presses and more than that, if we as a profession reevaluated how much we value this sort of publishing. In any case, just idle noodling, but I will say I don't suspect this book will be the last I pitch to Calgary
