At the recent PSP conference there was a panel on the cost of complying with the many new open access mandates from funding bodies. The panel explored the cost of compliance and how to reduce those costs. The current regulatory regime is complicated and administratively expensive, but the mandates will continue to be promulgated because the people calling for them are not the ones that have to implement them.
A new OA monograph series takes a discipline-specific approach to funding, licensing and editorial work.
A spate of open access “big deals” marks a shift from global offsetting to local offsetting. But the secretive nature of these deals makes them difficult to interpret.
Revisiting Joe Esposito’s post on distinguishing between features, products, and businesses. Not all features can become full-fledged businesses. Sometimes the best business case for a feature is to link it to an established business, where it adds value to assets that are already in place.
An interview with librarian and open access skeptic Jeffrey Beall. He discusses his work, the criteria for declaring an organization a “predatory publisher,” and how he would fix the scholarly communications system.
[Editor’s note: This is the edited text of a presentation that Joe Esposito gave as a keynote at the PSP conference in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 3, 2016. The slides for the presentation are embedded at the end of the text. […]
Kent Anderson returns to update his essential list of just what it is that publishers do.
An interview with Charles Watkinson, Mike Row, and Mark Edington of the newly-announced Lever Press open access book initiative.
One of the unanticipated consequences of the introduction of digital media to scholarly publishing is that publishing properties increasingly are organized into networks, with one property pointing to another for the benefit of all. This essay describes the network publishing model and comments on some of a network’s characteristics and economic opportunities.
The hidden costs of data availability policies.
Can PLOS exist without a mega-journal?
While all publishers like to have a strong brand, some brands are so prestigious that they actually serve to paralyze the managements responsible for them, making it impossible to introduce innovations and to develop the business. Vast bureaucracies arrive whose purpose is not to develop the business but to protect the vaunted brand. This is a management problem, not a marketing one, but it can stymie a publisher from pursuing a progressive agenda.
Robert Harington discusses Joe Esposito’s Scholarly Kitchen article from June 2015, entitled “The Mixed Marriage of For-profit and Not-for-Profit Publishing”, in context of his own experiences in the world of society publishing.
Gold open access for monographs is based on the notion that provosts will pay for what librarians will not. This seems like an improbable model for scholarly publishing. Publishing that is not based on end-user demand is not likely to have strong support in lean times.
Revisiting Joe Esposito’s classic post on how the governance of not-for-profit publishing entities plays a large role in those entities’ success or failure.