0.25 Removable type  (Page 2/8)

Among the technology advances available to the group that would become known as the Impressionists were the portable easel and paint in a tube. These devices allowed the painter to much more easily step outside. The flourishing of landscape paintings as part of the artistic movement was a direct result of the portability of what had previously been fixed and cumbersome tools of the studio. With the natural world before them, the Impressionists employed brush strokes and coloring that were, in contrast to convention, less defined, bounded, and delineated, which conveyed mood and emotion rather than a predominantly naturalistic reproduction of a scene. This new style gave many of the paintings an unfinished look, at least to some critics: the finality of a work of art was in this regard more porous or fluid. The future was let in, as it were, with an absence of a fixed sense of an ending. Contending with, goading, and in many respects stimulating this new movement was the French Academie and its annual Salon de Paris, which in the early period of the Impressionists clung to traditional and conservative definitions of painting and consistently voted against this new mode of expression.

My involvement with the Rice University Press shares many of these elements, on a much reduced and less consequential scale. A new technology, called Connexions, made feasible the idea of resuscitating the press. Connexions is an open-source e-publishing platform that offers an inexpensive, easy-to-use digital publishing apparatus and a means of producing high-quality print-on-demand books at far less cost than traditional publishing does. Connexions also offers authors a way to use multimedia—audio files, live hyperlinks or moving images—to craft dynamic scholarly arguments, and to publish on-demand original works in fields of study that are increasingly constrained by traditional print publishing.

Key goals that structured the re-opening of the Rice Press were contextualized by many problems in academic publishing and were thus a rejoinder to the prevailing authority. These included:

1. To publish original scholarly work in fields particularly impacted by the high costs and distribution models of the printed book.
2. To foster new models of scholarship. With the rise of digital environments, scholars are increasingly attempting to write studies that use new digital media as part of their arguments.
3. To provide more affordable publishing for scholarly societies and centers. Often, disciplinary societies and smaller centers, particularly in the humanities, publish annual reports, reflections on their field of study, or original research resulting from grants. For smaller organizations, the printing costs of these publications are prohibitive.
4. To partner with large university presses. In the wake of rising production costs and overhead, many university presses have closed or reduced the number of titles they publish, especially in the humanities and social sciences. As a result, many peer-reviewed books of high quality are waiting on backlog. Rice University Press always planned to work with selected university publishers to inexpensively publish peer-approved works.