Postscript on Sci-Hub: The University Press Edition

Not only is Sci-Hub pirating STM articles; it also has built a large collection of unauthorized university press monographs. This undermines the argument that Sci-Hub is an activist site fighting against corporate greed, as the university press community typically operates at a deficit. But university presses have many other challenges, and the threat posed by Sci-Hub is not the largest among them.

Transitioning to a More Unified Platform

Combining most if not all of a publisher’s scholarly content on a single publisher platform has not always been the norm. Oxford University Press’s transition to a new platform represents not just a one-to-one platform shift but in fact a consolidation from more to fewer platforms. This is a trend worth understanding and watching.

The Arms Race in Journals Publishing Heats Up

The competition among the largest journal publishers to acquire the rights to professional society publications is very keen. The bidding for these publications is likely to result in an alteration of strategy, whereby the bidding publishers seek to bind the societies more closely to them.