A long-term observation among physicians and their relationship with the scientific literature leads to thoughts about the risks we run with our increasing focus on authors and funders — the producers, not the consumers.
Publishing does not take place in a vacuum but in an ecosystem. The book business is changing not because of a preference for digital books but because physical bookstores are being removed from the ecosystem.
An audio story of how Carl Sagan found an unlikely philosophical ally.
Do we as publishers, societies and libraries understand how to grapple with the needs of academics with such a range of cultures?
A new essay by Rick Anderson proposes that libraries begin to focus more strongly on special collections and migrate away from the collection of commodity content. This would have a dramatic impact on the structure of the marketplace for scholarly materials and would be more disruptive than anything currently being bandied about. That may not be a bad thing.
Is access to the research paper really the same thing as access to the research results themselves? Are funding agencies creating a false equivalency by confusing the two? And does this confusion favor researchers in some fields over others?
The tragedy of the train wreck and oil fire in Lac-Mégantic, Québec is, first and foremost, a human one, with close to 50 people killed and the homes and businesses of many survivors destroyed. But a smaller tragedy has also come […]
They Might Be Giants offer a musical retraction notice.
Let’s imagine that open access publishing becomes the norm. What will the implications be? One implication is that it will likely create significant pressure on professional societies, which will seek new business arrangements to augment their income and keep their society together.