The Scholarly Kitchen
Archive for March 2008
Why I Like the Kindle
Source: WikipediaFor me, the Amazon Kindle has turned out to be the first useful eBook. I say this having used mine for a few months now. Yes, it has some drawbacks in its current packaging, mainly large navigational paddles that take some time to accommodate. But there are breakthroughs aplenty. It’s those breakthroughs that have … Continue reading
New Sources for Book Publishers?
A new book publishing venture called Fractal Press seeks to anthologize blogs and publish the resulting books using print-on-demand technologies. An interview with co-founder Navanit Arakeri can be found on Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 blog. Arakeri will start with personal finance books derived from finance blogs (Forbes.com may be part of this future?), but also … Continue reading
Microsoft Releases NLM DTD Plug-in
According to the CrossTech blog at CrossRef, Microsoft has released a beta version of their plug-in for marking up manuscripts with the National Library of Medicine (NLM) DTD. The plug-in is called the Article Authoring Add-in. The goal is to allow mark-up by the user/author farther upstream in the content-generation process. The plug-in can be … Continue reading
The Rise of Blogs, the Death of Newspapers
In a superb article by Eric Alterman, the New Yorker has assessed the state of American newspapers, and the rise of the Huffington Post. The (r)evolution is viewed through the lenses of Walter Lippmann‘s debates with John Dewey in the early 20th century about elites, democracy, and a successful society. I touched on this myself … Continue reading
Does Turnitin Decision Bode Well for Google?
A federal judge’s decision this month (reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education) cleared plagiarism-detection tool Turnitin of charges that it violates student copyrights, even though it stores digital copies of their papers. An appeal will likely be filed. The judge ruled that Turnitin’s use of the papers was “highly transformative,” thereby protected under fair-use … Continue reading
Web 2.0 Critiqued in “First Monday” Issue
The March 2008 issue of the online journal First Monday is entitled, “Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0.” It’s worth a look. Some pieces are especially provocative, including “Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation,” “Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance,” and “History, Hype, and Hope: An Afterward” [sic]. While the issue is a critique of … Continue reading
Google’s New Search Trick
The New York Times reports that Google has unveiled a new search trick, allowing users on Google to search within a specific site and generate results without visiting that site. Google sells ads against this additional captive traffic, sometimes for competing brands. SEO Smarty has a good post on this, as well. It also shows … Continue reading
A New Video for Author Rights
The Association of College & Research Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) have created a short video designed to familiarize researchers with some of the issues around author rights. A slide presentation has also been posted (warning – the slide presentation is a big file [12.5MB] … Continue reading
Target’s Experimental Games Experiment
It’s the weekend, so let’s have some fun. Games are educational, and probably always have been. For instance, chess teaches a lot. Now, one of the nation’s largest retailers is mixing experimental games into apparel marketing. According to Boing-Bong.net, Target has teamed up with EGP Apparel and the Experimental Gameplay Project to offer a line … Continue reading
MIT, Elsevier OCW Deal – Idealistic or Pragmatic?
Two weeks ago, Elsevier and MIT announced a deal allowing MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) project free use of a limited amount of images and text from Elsevier journals, all under a Creative Commons license. The limits are up to 3 figures per article or 100 words of text. On the text side, fair-use still prevails, so … Continue reading
Authors
The mission of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) is "[t]o advance scholarly publishing and communication, and the professional development of its members through education, collaboration, and networking." SSP established The Scholarly Kitchen blog in February 2008 to keep SSP members and interested parties aware of new developments in publishing.
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The Scholarly Kitchen is a moderated and independent blog. Opinions on The Scholarly Kitchen are those of the authors. They are not necessarily those held by the Society for Scholarly Publishing nor by their respective employers.
