A recent study points out that science blogs are failing to provide much in the way of community outreach and education to the non-scientist public. Is this really a failure, or is it an unrealistic expectation?
Penguin is experimenting with the iPad, and sharing what they’re thinking in this video demo. It’s pretty amazing stuff.
“Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does. Society knows how to react to scarcity.” Clay Shirky speaks at the opening session of NFAIS.
O’Reilly launches the “live book,” a way to extend the useful life of a book by turning hardware into software.
Older PhDs, longer postdoc stints, the rich getting richer, and other factors are creating a “founder effect” and consolidating power at the upper end of scholarship. Is it a Ponzi scheme? Can grassroot efforts change things?
Jason Lanier’s manifesto about the open culture exposes its lack of ingenuity, its commercial depredations, its amoral world view, and its elitist predilections. It’s worth reading in full.
CrossRef moves into the reference works area for e-books, with a linking approach and pricing that might just work.
Demand Media has created a journalism and custom content platform that disrupting neighboring publishing models. Can we learn something from their approach?
Why Google apparently gives government documents more protections than 19th century texts is just one of the puzzles in their usage guidelines.
We welcome Alix Vance, SSP Board Member and president of Paratext, as the newest chef in the Scholarly Kitchen.
Geezers blog. Why? Because they have something to say and are willing to say it.
An Oxford-style debate about the role of copyright law was held at the 2010 PSP. It involved interactive polling and a lively discussion.
This weekend Amazon pulled all of MacMillan’s books, both electronic and paper, from their store due to a dispute over eBook pricing policies. Is this the first battle in the war for control of the publishing industry?
Is Amazon giving up on the Kindle? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s certainly being pressured in an area of publishing that has heated up quickly and almost counter-intuitively.
The fact that scientific publishing hasn’t been disrupted may be a sign of a problem, not an advantage. A future choice may be disruption or irrelevance. Which will we choose?