PeerJ: Silicon Valley Culture Enters Academic Publishing
PeerJ is bringing something new to scholarly publishing, but it’s not a business model or a technology approach — it’s a mindset.
PeerJ is bringing something new to scholarly publishing, but it’s not a business model or a technology approach — it’s a mindset.
The details of PeerJ’s business model raise many questions, some of which may pertain to inherent Silicon Valley ways of doing business, others to efforts to create a community of required activity.
The idea that digital goods have no ongoing cost and can therefore be free has several problems, the basic one being reality itself.
PDA makes it necessary for a book publisher to continue to market a book long after it is published. A practical way to do this is to create superior metadata and distribute it directly to libraries for their catalogues.
How have publishers changed over the past decade? What have been the most important advances? The Chefs tackle the question, with some surprising answers (they might have even surprised themselves).
Two funny videos of processes in scientific life which many of us can use a good laugh about. Warning — Hitler, unsurprisingly, swears like a sailor when he’s frustrated. The peer review send-up: And, if you want more, there’s the […]
Is the Internet simply an irresistible “outside context” event for traditional book publishers? Two interesting articles make it clear that it may be, if wielded aggressively. The “outside context problem” was described in Iain M. Bank’s book “Excession,” in which […]
The ALPSP study of the possible effects of a six-month embargo for journal content shows that humanities and social science journals are more at-risk, but the entire industry could find the precipice if such mandates were to take shape.
Musicians have learned that the new corporate powers — technology companies — are possibly worse than the old corporate powers — record companies. How well would technology companies treat academics?
While just about everyone in publishing is absorbed with the technology platforms du jour, new platforms, including the personal area network, are emerging. A good strategy is to keep one’s eyes on the horizon before investing in the current tech fashion.
An exchange at the recent SSP Annual Meeting put the concept of “everyone’s a publisher” into stark contrast with reality. We’re not publishers. We’re unpaid writers for publishers like Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress.
3:30 p.m.: David C. notes that publishers are in an interesting quandary — they’re castigated for making a profit, yet they’re asked to make huge ongoing investments to make information more findable and usable. Publishers need to bring out the […]
The SSP Annual Meeting keynote speaker contemplates how new tools and new ways of presenting content might lead to a world of mixed algorithmic and human editing and curation.
Mary Meeker has been spearheading Internet trend tracking for years now. This year’s update shows that Internet growth remains robust. But the real news is the growth in smart device adoption — smartphones, tablet computers, e-readers. And the trend looks […]