What Constitutes Peer Review of Data? A Survey of Peer Review Guidelines
What constitutes peer review of a data set?
Plum Goes Orange – Elsevier Acquires Plum Analytics
Thoughts on Elsevier’s acquisition of Plum Analytics.
COUNTER Prepares Release 5 of its Code of Practice
An interview with the team behind the new Release 5 of the COUNTER Code of Practice.
Is the Proposed Merger of IDPF and W3C Good for Publishers?
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.
STM Future Trends 2020 provides publishers insights on the currents affecting them
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.
Text and Data Mining Are Growing and Publishers Need to Support Their Use – An AAP-PSP Panel Report
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.
Revisiting: Splitting the Difference — Does an Editorial Mutiny at a Journal Do Much Long-term Damage?
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.
How Might Scholarly Communication Benefit from Net Neutrality?
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.
Amazon Won the dot-book Top-level Internet Domain: Should Publishers Care?
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?
Why Are Publishers and Editors Wasting Time Formatting Citations?
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.
Trust, Privacy, Big Data, and e-Book Readers
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 […]
How Ink is Made: A Beautiful Reflection of the Analog World we still inhabit
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.
HighWire Press Moves Out of Stanford and Becomes an Equity-funded "Inc."
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.
When a Scholar is One Among 500, What Does it Mean to be "An Author"?
Last week, an editorial in Nature highlighted the problem of the proliferating number of authors on papers. Following a 2012 symposium at Harvard University, a small group has proposed a taxonomy of contributor roles that would add details to an author list and have tested that among a group of authors. Scholarly publishers should consider adopting this taxonomy to improve the accuracy and granularity to improve attribution and the assignment of credit.
Name identification using the ISNI: An interview with Laura Dawson
As online systems for discovering and distributing content have grown, so too has the need for unambiguous identification of people and the parties exchanging that content. Several systems have been in development in the past couple of years, notably the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) and the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) system. How these two systems relate, engage each other, and serve community needs isn’t always clear. In hopes of alleviating some of the confusion, I sat down with Laura Dawson from Bowker to discuss the International Standard Name Identifier, how it relates to ORCID, and other issues surrounding identity management systems.