Closed for the SSP Annual Meeting
We’re taking the next two days off for the SSP’s Annual Meeting. You can follow the twitter hashtag #ssp2015. New posts to resume on Monday.
Can We Stop Talking about the “System” of Scholarly Communications, Please?
There are countless proposals for a new “system” for scholarly communications, but such plans are typically top-down and overlook all the creative initiatives by individuals working independently.
Guest Post: CCC’s Roy Kaufman–A Text Mining Primer for Journal Publishers
What is text mining? The CCC’s Roy Kaufman offers a primer for publishers.
Old and Busted: Monkeys Taking Pictures — The New Hotness? Sharks Making Movies
Home movies from an unlikely source.
Guest Post: INASP’s Anne Powell — Availability Does Not Equal Access
INASP’s Anne Powell discusses the complexity of discovery, and the work INASP is doing to bring together tools, technologies, infrastructure and perhaps most importantly, relationships built on an understanding of the needs of users.
An Archaeology of Discovery
How valuable is the brand? It depends on the ecosystem or publishing epoch. Brands were the hallmark of the print era, but with the advent of new publishing paradigms, brands now compete with other useful means to identify materials.
Academia Versus Academia.edu: Should Tech Business Needs Trump Scholarly Culture?
Should the fast and loose rules of startup company business models and the spin-oriented language of advertising be given free rein in the scholarly community?
Citation Boost or Bad Data? Academia.edu Research Under Scrutiny
If a free website claimed that you could double citations to your papers simply by uploading them to their file sharing network, would you believe it? Or would you check their data?
So You Think Your Bookcase is Overcrowded…
Want to see 500,000 books moved to a new location?
Grab and Go and the Gravitational Pull of Discovery
A look at Facebook’s Instant Article initiative and what it means for discovery and for publishers.
Revisiting: On the Likelihood of Academia “Taking Back” Scholarly Publishing
Revisiting Rick Anderson’s 2013 post on what the options for the academy to take control of scholarly publishing, and whether any of those options seems feasible.
Putting Publishers’ Views of Libraries into Context
A presentation delivered to the International Coalition of Library Consortia, the thesis of which is that libraries and consortia have adopted policies that inadvertently marginalize smaller publishers, to the advantage of the largest publishers.
Should We Retire the Term "Predatory Publishing"?
Those who argue that “predatory” behavior is not only a problem among author-pays OA publishers have a good point. But this raises another question: is the term “predatory” itself really useful in the context of scholarly communication?
"Super" Outreach from the American Chemical Society
How much would Iron Man’s suit really weigh? This and other pressing questions answered by the American Chemical Society.
Sexism in Peer Review
When sexist comments make it into a technical review of a research article, journal editors and publishers are wise to take a moment and think about processes for finding, responding to, and eradicating this behavior.