There continue to be calls to consolidate all publishing activity in a single organization or unit. The various participants in scholarly communications often are hostile to the very idea of competition. But the evidence is otherwise: a diversity of publishing venues, all operated independently, yield better and more innovative results.
A recent blog post by ARL that was ostensibly about “To Kill a Mockingbird” was actually a set piece on the term of copyright. This rhetorical strategy of using news simply as a jumping-off point for a political statement undermines the credibility of public discourse, which hurts us all.
Although we in scholarly publishing typically focus on the problems we face, there is a small group of highly successful journal publishers. These publishers fall into three broad categories. To a great extent, these publishers are resistant to challenge.
Sci-Hub sets a reprehensible example, but publishers cannot be content simply to stamp out such services. In order to evolve the industry into the future, publishers have to provide services that make Sci-Hub and its ilk seem old-fashioned and inconvenient to use.
At the recent PSP conference there was a panel on the cost of complying with the many new open access mandates from funding bodies. The panel explored the cost of compliance and how to reduce those costs. The current regulatory regime is complicated and administratively expensive, but the mandates will continue to be promulgated because the people calling for them are not the ones that have to implement them.
Revisiting Joe Esposito’s post on distinguishing between features, products, and businesses. Not all features can become full-fledged businesses. Sometimes the best business case for a feature is to link it to an established business, where it adds value to assets that are already in place.
An interview with librarian and open access skeptic Jeffrey Beall. He discusses his work, the criteria for declaring an organization a “predatory publisher,” and how he would fix the scholarly communications system.
[Editor’s note: This is the edited text of a presentation that Joe Esposito gave as a keynote at the PSP conference in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 3, 2016. The slides for the presentation are embedded at the end of the text. […]
The Open Syllabus Project has created a database of over 1 million college syllabuses and extracted the names of the materials used in these courses. These materials are analyzed quantitatively and ranked. The creators of the service propose a new metric for the evaluation of academic publications.
One of the unanticipated consequences of the introduction of digital media to scholarly publishing is that publishing properties increasingly are organized into networks, with one property pointing to another for the benefit of all. This essay describes the network publishing model and comments on some of a network’s characteristics and economic opportunities.
While all publishers like to have a strong brand, some brands are so prestigious that they actually serve to paralyze the managements responsible for them, making it impossible to introduce innovations and to develop the business. Vast bureaucracies arrive whose purpose is not to develop the business but to protect the vaunted brand. This is a management problem, not a marketing one, but it can stymie a publisher from pursuing a progressive agenda.
Of the many ways to measure the quality of a publication, one that is often overlooked are the workings of the marketplace itself. Purchases for published material is made in large part on the basis of the quality of that material, making the marketplace something of an editor of genius. This mechanism incorporates all other metrics, from impact factor to altmetrics. Unfortunately, the marketplace is not free to exercise its judgment when many participants seek dominant and even monopolistic control.
Gold open access for monographs is based on the notion that provosts will pay for what librarians will not. This seems like an improbable model for scholarly publishing. Publishing that is not based on end-user demand is not likely to have strong support in lean times.
Revisiting Joe Esposito’s classic post on how the governance of not-for-profit publishing entities plays a large role in those entities’ success or failure.
The MOOCs seem to have faded from view. In large part this is because they were so relentlessly overhyped when they first appeared. But now various forms of online education have begun to get traction in the marketplace. An essay by Clay Shirky points out how online education is operating today and its implications for higher education.