The IDPF and the W3C recently announced they were making plans to merge. Will this merger be good for publishers by integrating them more closely into the community that manages the web infrastructure? Or will the merger result in diminishing publisher control over one of the important distribution standards for digital texts? The past five years of experience doesn’t give reason to be reassured of the outcome.
The International Association of STM Publishers released its Future Trends for 2020 last week. The sea upon which publishers sit is choppy and full of cross currents, that could prove perilous or fortunate, depending on one’s perspective and reaction.
During the AAP/PSP annual meeting last week, a panel discussion with representatives of a consortia, a publisher, and a technology provider explored the topic of text and data mining.
The recent editorial board defection from an Elsevier journal brings up issues raised in Todd Carpenter’s 2013 post on editorial boycotts and declarations of independence. They generate a lot of heat, but what do the data say about the actual success of the new journals compared to the journals that were overthrown.
Because so much of scholarly communication takes place via the internet, this week’s announcement by Federal Communications Commission Chairman, Tom Wheeler in support of Net Neutrality and regulation of the internet should be viewed as a positive thing for our community.
Last week, Amazon won an auction for the .book Top Level Domain on the internet, paying $10 million for the new real estate. Was it worth it? And should publishers be worried about what this means for them?
The majority of time spent in editing and formatting citations in the publication process is time wasted. We now have in place nearly all the components to use persistent identifiers, linked metadata, and style sheets to improve how citations can be structured and processed. Using these tools can significantly improve the accuracy of references and reduce the time editors spend on this production function. Even when automated, we bounce between linked metadata, then to text, then to metadata again.
At the opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair this year, a pre-meeting session was held called CONTEC. This follow-up to the much beloved, but now defunct, O’Reilly Tools of Change conference brought together an interesting mix of leadership from traditional […]
A YouTube Video, How Ink is Made, reminds us of the art and craft that goes into creating the physical products that remain a significant fixture of the publishing world.
On Friday, Highwire Press announced that it has received a “significant equity investment to support its strategic growth from Accel-KKR” and that it would be spinning off from the Stanford University Library, which has been its home for nearly 20 years. This post explores the implications of the transition.