The Internet rewards scale and creates clear competitive disadvantages for niche businesses. Now that a long-term economic downturn has made for starker realities, the effects of this basic set of facts seem inevitable.
The editor of eLife, on the eve of accepting his Nobel Prize, publishes an article designed to give his journal a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, the errors, lack of disclosure of his incentives, and inappropriate dismissal of incentives made the social graph light up with derision.
Under Open Access mandates, what constitutes a “federally funded” paper?
As consumers, we are often seduced by the apparent simplicity of the products we use. This can lead us to believe that products are as easy to make as they are to consume — and that is a mistake.
What is the role of the Copyright Clearance Center in a digital age?
The pursuit of transparency and use of disclosures in place of actual ethics may be creating a culture of accommodation rather than one fostering independence. Where does transparency belong?
The PMC NAC, facing controversies about its oversight functions and seeing the focus of its oversight embroiled in a public scandal, said nothing about these topics at its latest meeting.
More than twenty years later, confusion still reins over the McDonald’s coffee spill lawsuit, an example of how difficult it is to retroactively correct public perception.
Thoughts on the future of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC).
The US government’s rulemaking process will drive the implementation of the OSTP’s open access policy. An overview of that process is presented.
TED Talks are nearly always fascinating to watch. But are they accurate?
New documents show that the Director of the NCBI was deeply involved in getting eLife launched on PubMed Central, that NLM staff were uneasy about the shortcuts taken to make it happen, and that eLife was largely driving the bus throughout.
An interview from April 2012, which remains as relevant today in explaining the incentives driving much of the behavior in academic research centers and scientific and scholarly publishing.
Peter Brantley of Hypothes.is talks about efforts to bring an open layer of annotation to the Web, and what they mean for scholarly communication.
Why does PubMed preferentially link to PMC versions in its search result lists? Emails from 2011 suggest it’s specifically to generate more traffic to PMC and show off NLM services.