If anyone tries to find articles on management, culture, physics or anything scholar and written by authors from CEE, he will be up for a major disappointment. Not only there is not much published but it is impossible to find those bits that are getting published. Sites of scientific journals are not designed appropriately and are not user-friendly.
Recent article “Publishers and librarians in Central and Eastern Europe – love or hatred?” by Srecko Jelusic have identified some reasons for this problem:
- Lack of highly skilled personnel within the document production and access chain
- Language barriers
- Lack of cooperation among non-fiction writers, universities, publishers and libraries
Elsewhere, commercial publishers are moving into new field of collaborating authoring and wiki-publishing (A Business Book, Wiki-Style):
Pearson PLC, the publishing firm, is putting together We Are Smarter Than Me, a new book that tries to help businessmen make sense of blogs, online communities, and other interactive Web media. Professors at Penn and MIT have already written the volume’s chapter titles. But otherwise anyone can edit the text at http://www.wearesmarter.org/. Pearson expects to leave the wiki running until early next year, when ghostwriters will take over and mold the text into a publishable book.
With self-publishing growing (e.g. www.lulu.com), collaborative authoring made easy with wiki and an empty niche of scolarly publishing in CEE, could it be another niche for creation of knowledge economy by young entrepreneurs in the region?
