When Pragmatism Collides With Fundamentalism-PLOS Hikes Publication Fees
Why did such a small price increase arouse such a big reaction from open access advocates?
The Global Gold Open Access "Flip": A Realistic Plan or Magical Thinking?
Is a flip to a Gold OA world as easy as a recent paper suggests?
Ask The Chefs: How Has The Move To Distributed Networks Impacted Scholarly Publishing?
The digital era has increasingly led to distributed networks and a move away from centralized locations for both people and data. As our ability to communicate, participate, and share has increased, how has our ecosystem changed?
Proof of Concept, Proof of Program, and Proof of Scale in Scholarly Communication
New scholarly-communication initiatives have to do more than just demonstrate proof of concept: they have to demonstrate ongoing sustainability (what we might call “proof of program”) and the ability to create desirable products in the amounts needed (what we might call “proof of scale”). What do these look like when they’re achieved, and how are some recent initiatives doing?
Revisiting: The Editor — A Vital Role We Barely Talk About Anymore
Revisiting Kent Anderson’s 2014 post on the importance of editors–how much of what we see as a failure of “peer review” is really a failure of editorial oversight?
Library Publishing Redux: An Unprecedented Example of a Scholar/Library/Publisher Partnership
A collaborative venture between Oxford University Press and the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library exemplifies a new approach to library publishing, one that could be replicated elsewhere with relative ease and that offers potentially huge benefits to scholarship.
What Is “Publishing” if Even a Library Can Do It?
Libraries increasingly provide a wide range of publishing activities, but are there some areas where libraries are not active? It appears that libraries are unlikely to play a large role in publishing that is based on end-user demand.
Is it True that Most Open Access Journals Do Not Charge an APC? Sort of. It Depends.
We often hear that the majority of open access journals charge authors no fee for publication. Is that true? Well, it depends on how you count journals.
Amazon and the Future of Work
Amazon was recently criticized harshly in an article in the New York Times. The piece raises the question of whether the hard-charging culture of the tech industry is what we want.
Interstitial Publishing
Interstitial publishing, when paired with interstitial reading, is a new form of publishing that aims to take advantage of what previously was viewed as lost time in between primary events during the day. Interstitial publishing seeks ways to create new users by creating content expressly for those brief moments, which heretofore went unexploited for productive aims.
Deceptive Publishing: Why We Need a Blacklist, and Some Suggestions on How to Do It Right
Predatory publishing is a big and complex problem; so is calling out and shaming deceptive publishers by means of blacklisting. Is that something we should even do, and can it be done fairly, constructively, and helpfully? Yes, and here are some suggestions how.
What They Still Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School
A recent article about the publishing industry confuses the various business segments and offers prescriptions that are largely irrelevant to the task of running a publishing enterprise.
A Social World: Society Membership, Social and Economic Rewards and Human Behavior
How do shifts in cultural and economic views on social behavior affect the decision of a student, or researcher when deciding whether or not to join a relevant academic society? What social and economic forces are involved in an academic’s collaborative life, publishing life, and teaching life? Robert Harington delves into a fascinating report from the World Bank, entitled World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society and Behavior and its relevance for publishing and academia.
Revisiting: Is Access to the Research Paper the Same Thing as Access to the Research "Results"?
Is access to the research paper really the same thing as access to the research results themselves? Are funding agencies creating a false equivalency by confusing the two? And does this confusion favor researchers in some fields over others? Revisiting a 2013 post to re-examine these questions.
Ask The Chefs: What Is The Future of Membership Organizations? Does Being a Member Still Matter?
Looking to the future, do membership organizations still fit in? How can they maintain and extend their relevance?