Précis Volume 18 Issue 4
Précis of current issue
How does one of the world's oldest and most successful scientific journals harness the Web? Maxine Clarke, publishing executive editor of Nature, spells it all out for LOGOS readers. This is an excellent example of a brilliant specialist reaching out to the general reader, a recurrent theme in LOGOS's eighteen-year history.
For the latest contribution to our series on entrepreneurship in publishing, we persuaded Colin Whurr, who was the publisher of LOGOS for its first sixteen years, to relate his story, from the time he left the corporate life in 1987 until selling his company to John Wiley in 2005. He tells his story very frankly, with a light touch, implicitly challenging many of the values of the publishing industry.
LOGOS keeps a light touch on history, citing it only when the editors believe it has a contemporary lesson. This is our excuse for the third piece in this issue ("Chambers on Chambers" by William Chambers), as part of our "How Famous Names Began" series. After being run by generations of the family, W & R Chambers (founded 1832) was sold, but the name has survived and is just as famous as it was in the days when the family proudly attached their name to almost everything they published - their Journal, their Encyclopaedia and their Dictionary. How William Chambers (one of the two founding brothers) started the business has lessons in humility and hard work for the modern entrepreneur, and makes a story not unrelated to the preceding article by Colin Whurr, whose native city, coincidentally, is Edinburgh, the home of the Chambers brothers.
Our Immigrant series is now complete, and is rounded up by Henk Edelman and Gordon Graham. This series also is historical, although migration of publishers from Europe took place more than a century after the founding of Chambers. If we recall that Nature was founded in 1869, it seems that this issue has serendipitously developed a theme about the relevance of history.
Charles Levine's Editorial tells the story of LOGOS's technological adventures in the year just past. We have done all the things our techie friends have been telling us to do for many years, and are waiting to see the results. The editor is in his own person a bridge between the print and electronic cultures, and believes they can work in harmony.
Robert Bonn, a noted academic author, is responsible for half the text, and most of the impetus, in our latest Point Counterpoint debate with Gordon Graham on publisher/author relations. This series is intended to have opposite points of view clash, but the two authors of this one finished up by agreeing with each other. Publishers are warned that they do not come too well out of this piece. (Bonn and Graham met by chance in Frankfurt a few years ago - see Bonn's piece "Sore feet in Babel" in LOGOS 16/1.)
Extending Paul Richardson's theme in 17/4 (China assays the world markets) Eva Kneissl has written a fascinating expose of the dangers and opportunities facing Chinese fiction authors seeking publication in English.
And John Cox, a world authority on journal publishing, explains what "aggregators" do. (They sell journal articles).
Always self-critical and looking for new directions, LOGOS is deliberately seeking to lower the average age of its contributors and readers. Angus Phillips, Director of the Oxford Brookes University Publishing Centre, himself young, led an even younger group of his students to Frankfurt on their first visit last October. Six of them relate their impressions which predictably are a mixture of astonishment and fatigue.
How do you search? Easy, but how do you search effectively? That is the subject Making Search Work: Implementing Web, Intranet and Enterprise Search by Martin White, one of the Britain's pioneers of electronic publishing. His book is reviewed by David Percy, another pioneer, who accepted his invitation with exuberance. White writes engagingly for print culture graduates groping for electronic proficiency.
The title of a book, for those with memories long enough to recall the name of James Hilton, gives the Editor Emeritus a double entendre for this month's Last Word. For once, he deals with events on his doorstep.
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