This page provides OTHER SERVICES, AFFILIATIONS, and theoretical seeding for a "New Academic Publishing Model," above and beyond what is already on the Internet.

We provide consultation services at a reasonable rate for those wishing to receive guidance about self-publishing, either with ExistencePS Press as your imprint or without.

The following suggests a grass-roots publishing model, one which might become effective in solving the problem of Print On Demand (POD) publishing being recognized by universities in hiring, tenure and promotion decisions.

Large publishing houses usually offer great value and expertise. However, they sometimes make mistakes and have entrenched sub-cultures that prevent some views from taking hold, especially when they use blind reviewers that have reputational or financial incentives for discouraging a publisher to print and market a book that undercuts the blind reviewers’ own work. Moreover, some houses under the guise of legitimate university imprints, such as University Press of America (UPA), are really just vanity presses, and charge authors for all the publishing costs of a set number of books, including editorial work (assuming they even offer it, which UPA seemingly has not, at least in our experience with them). POD publishing offers an alternative, in that academics can follow a long historical tradition of authors occasionally self-publishing. Unlike that tradition, though, which involved books being created and stored no matter what the real demand turned out to be, POD is inexpensive, although not free, especially if editors or a book cover designer is employed. Books get printed only when someone orders and pays for them. One option for a POD-type publisher is GlassTree: GlassTree Academic Publishing

Although POD publishers like CreateSpace (now KDP/Kindle Direct Publishing/Amazon), Lulu, GlassTree and IngramSpark might be useful for novelists, non-academic authors and academic authors not needing to be reviewed, professors and aspiring professors who need to be evaluated by hiring, tenure or promotion committees will generally not find POD helpful. Those committees need to have some sense of the quality of the publications, and no committee can be expert in all the areas of academia. They therefore typically rely on the quality of the press in order to make decisions, and assume that the press has been diligent in weeding out prejudiced blind reviewers, which, again, is unfortunately not always the case.

A relatively easy, although not trivial, solution presents itself: Potential editors and reviewers on their websites can indicate their availability for pay by including “New Academic Publishing Model” somewhere on their site, along with their specialities and a list of their credentials and own publications. If and when an author contacts them (with a Google search for "New Academic Publishing Model" and a speciality), and negotiates a price for either a review/evaluation of a manuscript or an editorial contract, the reviewer/editor at the end of the project provides a transparent evaluation to be used on the book cover or externally, such as in letters or on the web, taking complete and public responsibility for what is said. No blind reviewing. The universities can now see directly who wrote a good review and what their credentials are. Obviously, a bad evaluation will cause the author to rework the material and find another evaluator or submit again to the previous evaluator. The committees can now make an equally good decision about the merits of publications based on publicly-available evidence. If and when the “new academic publishing model” grows, as an alternative (and not as a replacement) for large publishing houses, various entities will presumably be created to satisfy the needs of the academic community in the related ways, e.g., a Not For Profit organization might be created to rank reviewers and editors in order to help insure objectivity so they do not provide good reviews simply to encourage more business and more income.

Actually, a well-known and often-used model is already in place that does something similar: UpWork.com is a brokering service that allows registered participants to advertise or seek services from around the world; monitors the contracts and terms; holds funds in escrow until the work is completed and assets delivered, as confirmed by both parties; adjudicates disputes; and provides both sides the ability to evaluate the experience, for a very small fee. Academics could either use it as is or develop an almost identical model for academia.