Identity Crisis — Does Print Need to Die for Online to Flourish?
The bias against printing has a technological basis and some business rationale, but are we underserving our role as “content marketers” by shutting down this option out of hand?
Keeping It Real — Are Our Technology Expectations Out of Whack?
While we fuss over our interfaces and capabilities, we often forget how difficult software is to create and sustain, how easy it is to imagine otherwise, and how scarce engineering and programming resources are across the board.
How Do We Address the Continuing Problem of Inadequate and Deceptive Publishing Practices?
Technological trends have enabled experiments in publishing. But now that we’ve seen plenty of experiments, is it time to bring them under control?
A Report from Inside Innovation — The Excitement and Uncertainty of the New
In the midst of a couple of major projects, here are some top-of-mind lessons from cultivating and sharing ideas on the long road of innovation.
What Is the "News" Associated with Journal Publication?
The news function of journals has many dimensions, a major one consisting of where and when an article is published.
Strategic Thinking Exercise — Who Is Positioned to Keep Gold Open Access Growing?
It’s unclear who in the academic world has any incentive to pay for Gold OA publishing, especially as embargoes satisfy nearly everyone and cost next to nothing.
Keeping It Real — Ethics and Privacy as the Frontiers "Recursive Fury" Case Continues to Churn
Frontiers issues another statement about why the “Recursive Fury” paper was retracted, raising once again questions about why it was retracted, but shifting the focus more and more to how it was retracted.
Stick to Your Ribs: The Problems With Calling Comments "Post-Publication Peer-Review"
Revisiting Kent Anderson’s 2012 post about how comments and letters probably shouldn’t be branded as “post-publication peer review”.
Bitcoin and Flash Traders — Leveraging Scarcity Within the Internet's Infrastructure
Two ways to leverage scarcity in the computer world are worth examining, because they represent baffling new ways for the rich to get richer.
Frontiers of Intimidation — What a Controversial Paper's Travails Teach Us About Libel Laws and Publishing
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.
Does Creative Commons Make Sense?
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?
What Does "Unsustainable" Mean?
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.
Wellcome Money — In This Example of Open Access Funding, the Matthew Effect Dominates
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.
This One Doesn’t Scale — One Big Reason Why Online Advertising Is Comparatively Limited
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.
Layers Upon Layers — Taking Advantage of the Great Infrastructure Build-Out of the Twenty Aughts
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?