In the shift beyond content licensing and towards supporting researcher workflow, Elsevier has few competitors. A key question is whether Digital Science and SpringerNature should be understood strategically as one company, or two. Who owns Digital Science?
In a move entirely consistent with its strategy to pivot beyond content licensing, Elsevier has acquired bepress, the institutional repository provider.
Scholarly publishers have long thought in categories such as journals, monographs, textbooks, and reference. Reference as a category is splitting in two.
A group of scholarly publishers has launched a fellowship to improve diversity and inclusion among editorial employees.
Is our objective for open access and scholarly communication to maximize public access to research outputs or to bend the cost curve for licensed e-resources? Definitions of success matter.
Yesterday, Ithaka S+R published findings from our triennial survey of library deans and directors at academic institutions in the United States. The report examines the strategic directions of academic libraries as well as their staffing and spending plans for the coming years. The pivot towards new research, teaching, and learning services, and towards distinctive collections, is continuing, although it is encountering some headwinds.
Several services attempt to gather up “all” of the content across publishers. This post provides an overview and taxonomy.
As growth in content licensing slows, sophisticated content providers are building businesses supporting researcher workflow and university business processes.
University presses bring a diversity not only of costs, scale, and business models, but also of organizational capacity, incentives, and objectives. As efforts are mounted to transition monograph publishing to open access, it is vital that we recognize the richness and complexity of this community.
This summer, Project MUSE announced that it is developing its ability to host and distribute open access (OA) ebooks. Project MUSE’s director Wendy Queen spoke with me recently about this program and some of the broader strategic issues we should be contemplating.
The University of Florida and Elsevier have entered into a partnership to build links between the institutional repository and ScienceDirect, which has received quite a bit of criticism in recent weeks.I have found it useful to try to understand the different sides of what seems to me to be a debate about how best to utilize the increasingly mature infrastructure and programmatic capacity for scholarly communications.
IP authentication is the most important mechanism for authorizing access to licensed e-resources resources. Substantial business and policy issues for libraries and publishers alike connect up to IP authentication. Today, there is substantial interest in eliminating IP authentication, so it is timely to examine the implications if we were soon to see its end.
Today, Elsevier is announcing that it has acquired SSRN, the preprint and publishing community that focuses on social sciences and law. Among other things, the SSRN acquisition is another step in Elsevier’s path towards data and analytics. In a number of ways, Mendeley is the linchpin for this acquisition. More generally, this acquisition plainly indicates Elsevier’s interest in the open access repository space. Finally, universities, their libraries, and other publishers, should have on their minds some of the policy and governance issues around the data that Elsevier is accumulating and the uses to which they may be put.
Although journals, other serials, and reference have made a large scale transition away from print, we must not assume that the same path will inevitably be pursued for other components of collections. A combination of business models, reading practices, and other user needs will play the biggest role in determining the prospects for the printed monograph. Today, it seems that a dual-format environment may remain before us for some time, and there will be advantages for the libraries, publishers, and intermediaries that can develop models for monographs that work best in such an environment.
A new survey looks at the ways readers discover scholarly publications. Due to methodological limitations, scholarly information professionals should practice caution in interpreting the findings and considering potential business responses. Ultimately, it is impressive that the researchers have taken on such a large-scale study, which adds some additional context to our understanding of discovery, especially in its diversity.