An odd circumstance of the book business is that no one really knows which books are sold to libraries and how important libraries are to overall book sales. At the heart of the problem is the fact that Amazon, which sells books to libraries, does not share any sales data. This post suggests a couple ways to get at that data in the face of Amazon’s obstinacy. Continue reading
Fewer than half of NIH sponsored clinical trials are published within 30 months, and 4 out of 5 FDA trials fail to publicly register results (as mandated by law), studies published in the BMJ report. Authors and sponsors may be the strongest source of reporting bias. Continue reading
Amazon’s power in book publishing continues to grow, gaining momentum naturally as its success makes failure more likely for incumbents. There’s a lot to respect in what they’re doing. Continue reading
Over the past three decades, the research library has been receiving a smaller proportion of the university budget. Does this trend reflect the failure of library administrators and the declining relevance of libraries? Or does it tell the story of self-control and growing efficiency against a backdrop of spiraling higher education costs? Continue reading
Editors of business journals strategically coerce authors to increase citation rates, a new study in Science reports. Continue reading
Conventional wisdom has well-known researchers getting more and more requests for reviews, leading some to suggest the system is broken and about to implode. Yet, when real-world data are analyzed, some surprises emerge. Continue reading
A recent ALA panel on discovery prompts some musings about the direction that local search will take and the likelihood that one vendor will control access to almost all library collections. Continue reading
Chart of the Day: How Science Stacks Up in the US Budget — from an Atlantic article entitled, “The Innovation Nation vs. the Warfare-Welfare State“:
The rankings of journals based on F1000 scores reveals a strong bias against larger journals and those with little disciplinary overlap with the biosciences. Continue reading
Google once represented the spirit of Internet optimism distilled into a successful company. Now, with more cynical plays and shuttering experiments, what does Google’s new approach tell us about the Internet of tomorrow? Continue reading