The Scholarly Kitchen

Earlier today, the British Academy released a research project report, Open access journals in Humanities and Social Science. The project was funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), and was meant to address practical issues that may arise surrounding open access (OA) publishing, particularly in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS). There … Continue reading →

The UK’s National Trust owns 140 libraries containing hundreds of thousands of volumes, many of them in the public domain. What would it take to make those books available to the public that owns them? Continue reading →

Two ways to leverage scarcity in the computer world are worth examining, because they represent baffling new ways for the rich to get richer. Continue reading →

Retracting a paper identifying a link between climate change deniers and conspiracy theorists provokes more conspiracy theories, but it turns out the real impetus for retraction is disappointingly parochial and explicable. Continue reading →

University presses cite a number of reasons to sell books directly to end-users. The principal reason is to establish a relationship with the customer. But once that relationship has been initiated, what business purpose does it serve? Continue reading →

With all the disruption and upheaval in digital scholarly communications, how do today’s researchers decide which articles and publications they can trust to read, cite, and write for? A recent study finds that, somewhat surprisingly, peer review and other traditional tools remain as popular as ever with most groups, though social media is increasingly popular with some. Continue reading →

This post explores the confusing landscape of ebook readers, presenting a few of the options available along with their pros and cons. Continue reading →

Axiomatically more complicated than copyright, built to provide no legal cover, and possibly put in place by the technocrats in Silicon Valley, does Creative Commons make sense for the creative class? Continue reading →

A sense of gloom hangs over academic publishing these days. As library budgets are cut, and the fear of OA mandates cutting profit margins clouds publishers’ sense of their place in the world, what is it like to be a publishing professional in this era of climate change? Continue reading →

Even with the protections of traditional copyright, an author may lose control of his original work and see it misappropriated and used for hateful ends. So is it any wonder that many authors have concerns about being required to publish under CC-BY? Continue reading →

The Onion’s ever-entertaining fake news service offers up this perfect explanation of the current state of social media, as the established companies scramble to remain relevant. Continue reading →

Can machine readable articles, built on author/editor/publisher curated declarative statements and the associated data (or links thereto), be a way of generating metrics that get us nearer to a ‘standard candle’ of scientific research output? Continue reading →

Public access to research data offers clear benefits for reproducibility in some fields. But in the world of cancer cell biology, complexity reigns, and replicating results is not so easy a process. Continue reading →

We breeze by the statement that “scholarly publishing economics are unsustainable,” without contemplating what it actually means, how deep it goes, and why it has been allowed to get this way. Continue reading →

A survey of university presses on selling books directly from their Web sites shows that for most presses, sales hover around 1% of total volume, but a concerted effort to improve Web marketing could increase that figure to 3% or perhaps even more. Continue reading →

A surprising set of recipients dominate a list of APC payments released by Wellcome Trust, suggesting that OA is not leading to a reshaping of the industry but perhaps merely driving further consolidation. Continue reading →

SXSW Interactive is over, but the impact is not. Why SXSW continues to be relevant to business and publishing. Continue reading →

Ithaka S+R has just published the latest in its ongoing series of triennial library director surveys, and its findings are interesting and, in some ways, sobering. Continue reading →

There will never be a “Netflix for books” if by that term one means a comprehensive collection. Book aggregations must serve the overarching needs of the publisher to generate revenue and are thus best viewed as simply one channel among many. Continue reading →

Online advertising fails to match print advertising in its scalability, slowing the transition to online for major journals and capping the potential for online subscription prices to be offset in a manner similar to print’s legacy business. Continue reading →

A video of Rick Anderson’s recent talk at the Smithsonian, on why it’s so hard to have conversations about open access that don’t devolve into shouting matches and accusations of bad faith Continue reading →

The infrastructure layers that are emerging specifically for scholarly publishers, authors, and readers are yielding new services and even more layers. What’s next? And what’s missing? Continue reading →

As online systems for discovering and distributing content have grown, so too has the need for unambiguous identification of people and the parties exchanging that content. Several systems have been in development in the past couple of years, notably the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) and the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) system. How these two systems relate, engage each other, and serve community needs isn’t always clear. In hopes of alleviating some of the confusion, I sat down with Laura Dawson from Bowker to discuss the International Standard Name Identifier, how it relates to ORCID, and other issues surrounding identity management systems. Continue reading →

As university presses become more involved with D2C marketing, they are going to confront the need for clearly articulated privacy policies. The time to put those policies in place is now. Continue reading →

Interlibrary loan is a complex and difficult issue in the realm of ebooks. A new tool called Occam’s Reader hopes to simplify the process for libraries, provide better service to users, and reassure publishers worried about rights management. Continue reading →

Are authors leaving PLOS ONE for higher performing journals? Continue reading →

Scholarly Kitchen chef, Robert Harington asks “what do researchers want?” From those in mathematics to tumor immunology, from gerontology to Melville studies, the answer is often “to do my research in the best way possible.” Using a dose of pythonesque humor, this post chips away at this question, providing an interesting example of how the American Chemical Society is thinking through such issues. Continue reading →

Data sharing and publication is a topic we need to consider carefully, and weigh the risks, costs, and benefits, as well as the complexities. Continue reading →

PLOS has set a new policy, requiring authors to make all data behind their published results publicly available. This has been met with a great deal of controversy from the research community. Thoughts on why this policy and why now… Continue reading →

Publishers are always said to be slow-moving, but the pace of development at the CHORUS organization belies that. Continue reading →

Businesses are using more data than ever to inform decision making. While the truly large Big Data may be limited to the likes of Google, Amazon, and Facebook, publishers are nonetheless managing more data than ever before. While the technical challenges may be less daunting with smaller data sets, there remain challenges in interpreting data and in using it to make informed decisions. Perhaps the most daunting challenge is in understanding the limitations of the dataset: What is being measured and, just as importantly, what is not being measured? What inferences and conclusions can be drawn and what is mere conjecture? Where are the bricks and mortar solid and where does the foundation give way beneath our feet? Continue reading →

Despite the feeling that the factory has turned out just another from the same template, Gladwell’s new book turns out to be refreshing, surprising, and thought-provoking. Continue reading →

Alan Alda spoke at the AAAS meeting in Chicago on the theme of communicating science to the public. We often view the communication of science, be it in one’s own scholarly journals or in mass media, as somehow distinct and meaningfully different from other communication styles. However, Alda made the point repeatedly during his presentation that this should not be the case. One can accurately convey science with stories and an engaging style that not only brings the reader along in the discovery process, but also preserves the truth and validity of the underlying discovery. Alda made the point that “Communication is not something you add on to science, it is of the essence of science.” Publishers can help to improve how science is communicated; indeed it is at the core of what publishers bring to the process of distributing science. Continue reading →

While we usually think of innovators as visionaries with big ideas that challenge the very assumptions of the way we conduct our lives, many innovations seem to happen almost by accident. The challenge is how to make these accidents occur more often and to benefit from them. Continue reading →

Much of the public debate about open access is polarized, but a recent study of scientific communications shows that extremism breeds more extremism. Isn’t it time we started to look at more effective ways to communicate – to listen, learn to understand each others’ views, and find ways of collaborating and cooperating, rather than competing? Continue reading →

A contemplation of constraints — how some have vanished, how others are needed, how new ones are emerging, and the benefits constraints deliver. Continue reading →

Social media presents a new set of marketing opportunities for publishers, the most important of which is a new paradigm for thinking about the world of digital media, which now is the world of the social stream instead of the world of cyberspace. Continue reading →

Ann Okerson is the National Contact Person for SCOAP3, a partnership aimed at converting high energy physics journals to an open access model. Continue reading →

A particularly pervasive type of error in the ROARMAP registry seems designed to give the impression that many institutional OA policies are more mandatory than they really are. What purpose does this serve? Continue reading →

When does it make sense to call an Open Access policy a “mandate” — and when does it constitute unhelpful exaggeration? Continue reading →

With the ease of posting and searching online for final published PDFs of journal articles and ebooks, publishers have turned to digital solutions for finding unauthorized copies of copyrighted materials. Recently, some authors have taken exception to these policies leaving publishers to defend these practices and explain author rights when it comes to sharing accepted manuscripts. Continue reading →

When novel, newsworthy results are discovered to be wrong, is that still news? Continue reading →

A recent announcement from the UK government highlights the unanswered economic questions behind its open access policy. Continue reading →

EBSCO has recently acquired altmetrics startup Plum Analytics. What will this mean for both companies and altmetrics in general? Continue reading →

Adam Etkin describes the workings and rationale for scoring papers and journals based on the rigor of peer review they received prior to publication. Continue reading →

The Journal of Cultural Anthropology is now becoming open access. This points to one path a professional society can follow if it cannot derive significant income from library sales or if its membership is more interested in wider dissemination of material than the uses income from journals can be put to. Continue reading →

The “publish or perish” culture has created a major mega-journal. But are its boundaries and standards built properly to avoid becoming an enabler of that culture? Continue reading →

A recent research report from Simba Information analyzes the market for publications in the social sciences and humanities. Continue reading →

Amazon is now the most important participant in the business of scholarly books, but it faces few threats. This post hypothesizes about where challenges to Amazon could come from. Continue reading →

A study of journal advertising support in large, multi-specialty journals fails on many key fronts. Continue reading →