While we usually think of innovators as visionaries with big ideas that challenge the very assumptions of the way we conduct our lives, many innovations seem to happen almost by accident. The challenge is how to make these accidents occur more often and to benefit from them.
A contemplation of constraints — how some have vanished, how others are needed, how new ones are emerging, and the benefits constraints deliver.
Social media presents a new set of marketing opportunities for publishers, the most important of which is a new paradigm for thinking about the world of digital media, which now is the world of the social stream instead of the world of cyberspace.
With the ease of posting and searching online for final published PDFs of journal articles and ebooks, publishers have turned to digital solutions for finding unauthorized copies of copyrighted materials. Recently, some authors have taken exception to these policies leaving publishers to defend these practices and explain author rights when it comes to sharing accepted manuscripts.
A recent research report from Simba Information analyzes the market for publications in the social sciences and humanities.
Amazon is now the most important participant in the business of scholarly books, but it faces few threats. This post hypothesizes about where challenges to Amazon could come from.
The European Union sets up a public consultation on copyright policies.
Some predictions about the future of scholarly publishing, which acknowledges the continuing central role of the major STM publishers.
This is an announcement of a university press research project, which includes a link to a survey we hope every book publisher will fill out. The project is sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The focus is on how university presses can sell books, both print and digital, directly from their Web sites. The project report will cover current practices and recommend courses of action.
As the scholarly communication environment changes, so does the monograph–and the nature of scholarship itself. A few years from now, what will these terms even mean?
Another association of historians has recommended that students be allowed to impose limited embargoes on their dissertations. And so the question arises again: whose work is the dissertation, and who should control it?
The five stages of book publishing outlined here describe the arc as publishers move from the traditional model (where print books were sold mostly in bookstores and to libraries) through a range of developments using online media, culminating in new forms of subscription marketing.
The beginning of the holiday season means it’s time for our annual list of our favorite books read during the year. Today brings Part 2 of the list.
The beginning of the holiday season means it’s time for our annual list of our favorite books read during the year. Part 1 today, Part 2 tomorrow.
Gold open access publishing has proved to be successful, but it has certain limitations. This essay probes what those limitations are, but it argues that OA’s limitations do not outweigh its strengths. Gold OA most usefully coexists with traditional publishing models.