7/15/96
CONTACT: Stanford University News Service (650) 723-2558
COMMENT: Norris Pope, Stanford University Press (415) 725-0827
e-mail: norris.pope@forsythe.stanford.edu
John Sack, Highwire Press (415) 723-0192
e-mail: sack@forsythe.stanford.edu
Stanford University Press and the Stanford University Libraries have been awarded a half-million dollar grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to publish scholarly books on the Internet.
The award will launch a collaboration between the press and the libraries to circulate scholarship in Latin American studies to a worldwide audience. The project is intended to provide access to scholarly information that has had limited distribution because it has been published in small print runs and therefore sold at high prices.
"The project is unprecedented in the field of scholarly publishing. With this collaboration, we are ideally situated to explore the value of networked publishing," said Norris Pope, director of the Stanford University Press.
Stanford University Press has served for 70 years as the university's scholarly imprint. Its offerings in Latin American studies, which include works in history, politics and anthropology, have won numerous awards, including the Beveridge Prize, the Bolton Prize and the Wheeler-Voeglein Prize.
Stanford Libraries has become a center for electronic publishing activities through its Highwire Press division. Highwire Press collaborated with the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology to produce the Journal of Biological Chemistry Online, one of the first full-text World Wide Web versions of a science journal. Currently, it is working with the American Association for the Advancement of Science to publish the online version of Science magazine. It also is working on online versions of a number of other scientific publications, including the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Journal of Neuroscience, Journal Watch, Pediatrics and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The books scheduled for publication as a result of the new, three-year collaboration include 12 highly regarded works that Stanford University Press has previously published in print editions, along with four new works that will be released electronically in advance of their print debut.
Titles from the group of 12 include The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries, by James Lockhart; Scarcity and Survival in Central America: Ecological Origins of the Soccer War, by William Durham; and Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America, edited by Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully.
These volumes will be accessible electronically on the World Wide Web without the need for a special workstation, allowing all readers to browse or download and copy any material they access. Access to the material will be by subscription to the collection or by purchasing access to a portion of one of the texts.
The collaborators will use technical assistance from a number of sources, including faculty and staff from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico.
-dfs
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