Ask The Chefs: What’s Your Favorite ‘Dirty Little Secret’ About Scholarly Publishing?
Every industry has its dirty little secrets. This month we asked the Chefs what those secrets are in scholarly publishing.
Revisiting: The Editorial Fallacy
Revisiting Joe Esposito’s 2010 post on the disruptive publishing environment, in which publishers cannot rely on a purely editorial strategy, as many of the issues now facing them are not editorial in nature.
A Taxonomy of University Presses Today
University presses bring a diversity not only of costs, scale, and business models, but also of organizational capacity, incentives, and objectives. As efforts are mounted to transition monograph publishing to open access, it is vital that we recognize the richness and complexity of this community.
Guest Post, Adam Hodgkin: Do Books Need More Aggregation or More Curation — Time to Uncircle the Wagons?
Guest post from Adam Hodgkin, looking at the differences between the academic books and journals markets, and how the aggregation strategies for journals may not work in the same manner for books.
Can Highly Selective Journals Survive on APCs?
Are the APC levels set for high-end OA journals too low to be sustainable? Are there other ways that might help high-end OA journals pay their way?
Innovation, Growth and the Art of Balance
Robert Harington references our current altered state in politics as a tool to reflect on the need to invoke balance in publishing innovation, and growth.
APCs and Competition: What Shulenberger Got Wrong
Would a systemwide “flip” to open access by means of universal article-processing charges work? David Shulenberger argues that it would not, and he may be right — but not for the reasons he gives.
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.
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.
How Much Does Publishing Cost?
There have been several recent studies of what it costs to publish academic monographs, but they all mistake the cost of production with the cost of publication. This post summarizes the issues and suggests a very simple way to calculate the cost of publication.
Seven Things Every Scholarly Publisher Should Know about Researchers
What should publishers know about researchers and their work? Alice Meadows and Karin Wulf follow up a post earlier this year about “Seven Things Every Researcher Should Know about Scholarly Publishing.”
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.
The Costs of Flipping our Dollars to Gold
An interview with MacKenzie Smith and Ivy Anderson, discussing the recent Pay It Forward report on the economic impact of a shift to Gold open access for scholarly journals.
Scientific Reports On Track To Become Largest Journal In The World
Higher Impact Factor, faster publication, and weaker data availability policies may be drawing authors away from PLOS ONE.
A Quick Tour Around the World of Scholarly Journal Publishing
A presentation to the 2016 ISMTE US Conference. Something of a “state of our industry” overview, or perhaps, everything I needed to know I learned from the other bloggers at The Scholarly Kitchen.