Publishing is vital to Dana’s mission to encourage the public to discover new ideas and trends in neuroscience, immunology, and arts education as well as to interchange ideas and data among scientists. Dana periodicals and books, the publications of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, and other products offer readers clear, accessible accounts and interpretations of the latest work and some of the most original thinking in the fields of Dana’s interest. Many publications provide educators with materials that can excite students about learning. The books for general readers are distributed worldwide by the University of Chicago Press for sale through bookstores and online retailers. Readers can also read, download, or order free publications on the Dana Web site.
Cerebrum: The Dana Forum on Brain Science changed format from a quarterly print journal to a monthly online journal in January 2006, to readers’ immediate advantage. Free of the six-month lead time required to assemble a print issue, Cerebrum needed only three weeks to publish online two in-depth articles about stroke after a hemorrhagic stroke felled Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon, in January.
The Cerebrum section of the Web site also offers a fully searchable Web archive of all its articles, reviews, and book excerpts since 1998. A collection of 2006’s Cerebrum reporting was published in paperback in early 2007 for print readers, in what we expect will be a Cerebrum annual.
Launched in fall 2006, “First Words—The Dana Press Blog” offers online readers staff-written comments and information about Dana books and periodicals, news about Dana Press authors, word of books and articles published elsewhere by Dana Alliance members and Dana grantees, links to related information, Webcasts, and podcasts on the foundation site, as well as reader comments and our responses to them.
For Dana’s Web site, the Dana Press staff provided book information and reviews, chapter excerpts, and staff-written interviews with the authors of the three books we released in the fall. To complement Dana’s News Office–produced Webcasts, Dana Press staff wrote day-after news stories and photographed events held at the Dana Center in Washington, DC. In 2007, we plan to add more, including searchable content from The Dana Guide to Brain Health, a 733-page reference work published in paperback in 2006.
We continue to expand domestic and global readership of our books by selling publishing rights to publishers in other countries and to publishers who will bring out paperback editions. Two 2005 titles, The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius, by Nancy Andreasen, and The Ethical Brain, by Michael Gazzaniga, came out in paperback this way in 2006; they and the 2006 titles Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense and Fatal Sequence: The Killer Within also were published in book-club editions, while Raymond DePaulo’s Understanding Depression was released in an audio version. We also have made, or are in negotiations on, translation rights deals for several of our titles, which will be published in Japanese, Dutch, German, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Korean, Japanese, and, new in 2006, Chinese.