Scientific Publishing in a Time of Political Assaults
With recent political upheaval sparking activism among scientists, librarians, and educators, where do publishers fit? What are they doing? What should they do?
Guest Post: Perry Hewitt — Bringing the Cathedral to the Bazaar: Academic Content and Wikipedia
Perry Hewitt discusses JSTOR’s efforts to create and disseminate peer-reviewed scholarship to inform our post-truth world.
Let’s Make the Facts Louder than the Opinions
A public service message from the Weather Channel.
Peering across the Copyright DMZ
A new book reviews various instances of piracy in the media industry and proposes using Big Data analyses as a means to manage it.
Economics, Silicon Valley, and Information Warfare — Is Accuracy Becoming a Luxury Item? Or a Casualty?
Information warfare is both tactical and strategic, with much of its success stemming from the weakened economics of the current information economy. Scholarly publishers have experienced this in many ways, from Google Scholar to predatory publishers to pre-print archives — all answers to the calls for “free information” and all revealing tactical and strategic vulnerabilities as accuracy and facts become luxury items in the information war.
How’s That "Abundance" Thing Working Out For You?
The age of information abundance may have fundamental flaws — barriers to entry that create false equivalence; dissemination tools that conflate fake information with responsible sources; self-reinforcing loops of conspiracy and paranoia; and social fragmentation that makes societal disruption more likely. What can be done? Here are a few ideas.
How To Live Safely in a Post Factual Universe
2016, The. Laughs. Just. Keep. Coming… This is a post about how events in the non-scholarly publishing world are going to have a very big impact on us. Question is, what are we going to do about what’s going on?
Revisiting: Why Publishers’ Brands Matter
Revisiting Joe Esposito’s 2010 post on the role publishers’ brands play in purchasing decisions.
Love That Dirty Water — Are We Headed Toward a "Clean Science Act"?
With greater awareness of the foibles and failings of scientific publishing, weaker self-regulation systems, and a trend toward governmental regulation of funding, is external regulation of the scientific journals system now inevitable?
Old Media, New Media, Data Media: Evolving Publishing Paradigms
We typically classify publishers as Old Media and New Media, but now we have companies that are part of a new paradigm, the Dat Media company. Such companies sit above both Old and New, studying patterns in usage and in the databases of information aggregated by publishers.
Visualizing Citation Cartels
Citation network maps may indicate when gaming is taking place. Proving intention is a different story.
Ask The Chefs: What Is The Future Of Peer Review?
Looking forward to Peer Review Week, we asked the Chefs “What is the future of peer review?” #PeerRevWk16
Book Review — The Traps of Big Data Revealed in "Weapons of Math Destruction" by Cathy O’Neil
The new book, “Weapons of Math Destruction,” calls out many worrying trends in the application of big data, with particularly salient entries on higher education rankings, for-profit universities, the justice system, insurance, and employment.
Hollywood Takes on Peer Review
This summer’s blockbuster movie “Ghostbusters” is, amazingly, about academic peer review and the quality of scholarly publishing. Is it possible that the specialized world of scholarly communications now has mass appeal?
Annual Reports — What Do They Actually Tell Us?
Annual reports from publishing organizations always have a marketing slant, even when they are required filings with governmental bodies. But some are more marketing-oriented than others, and should not be mistaken for transparency, but rather tend toward rationalization. eLife’s recent report, challenging others to be as transparent, is itself opaque and purposeful.