Cooperstown, Ground Zero for Altmetrics
The altmetrics movement is a key aspect of scholarly communications today. We can learn more about altmetrics by studying the statistical analysis of baseball.
Open Access: Fundamentals to Fundamentalists
There is a certain fundamentalism that pervades discussions around open access policies and business models. On the one hand there are the advocates, and through the laws of conservation of energy, the equal and opposite reaction of anti-open access advocacy. There seems little room for rational debate about open access in the midst of such an antagonistic atmosphere.This post asks us to spend our time thinking through a range of open access models, experimenting and refining, rather than forcing ourselves down the road of policy mandates that potentially discourage innovation.
Identity Crisis — Does Print Need to Die for Online to Flourish?
The bias against printing has a technological basis and some business rationale, but are we underserving our role as “content marketers” by shutting down this option out of hand?
University Presses: "Under Fire" or Just Under the Gun (Like the Rest of Us)?
Are university presses really “under fire,” or are they simply experiencing the natural consequences of doing the wrong things at the wrong time in a marketplace that has evolved away from them?
Keeping It Real — Are Our Technology Expectations Out of Whack?
While we fuss over our interfaces and capabilities, we often forget how difficult software is to create and sustain, how easy it is to imagine otherwise, and how scarce engineering and programming resources are across the board.
Build a Better Mousetrap
The best way to increase D2C sales is to work in increasing the traffic to your site. Without traffic, there can be few sales. Unfortunately, the university press community has paid little attention to building Web traffic.
How Do We Address the Continuing Problem of Inadequate and Deceptive Publishing Practices?
Technological trends have enabled experiments in publishing. But now that we’ve seen plenty of experiments, is it time to bring them under control?
Bears Always Sound Smarter
Discourse about new ideas in publishing can be broken by the appetite to make exquisitely insightful remarks about things to do not yet exist. To work on truly new things, we have to stop performing the role of the skeptic.
A Modest Proposal for Scaled-up Open Access
A new white paper by K|N Consulting offers an intriguing blueprint for an Open Access journal publishing system at mass scale, one built on a three-way partnership between publishers, libraries, and higher-education institutions. It suggests interesting possibilities and raises equally interesting questions.
The Evolving Ecosystem for Journals Publishing
The world of journals publishing is constantly changing, and one relatively new entrant is the library as publisher. There is a need to study and publish these programs in order to optimize their performance.
Strategic Thinking Exercise — Who Is Positioned to Keep Gold Open Access Growing?
It’s unclear who in the academic world has any incentive to pay for Gold OA publishing, especially as embargoes satisfy nearly everyone and cost next to nothing.
Reinventing the Impact Factor for the 21st century
If we were to build a citation reporting system today, what would it look like? In this post, I propose a solution that would do away with a separate Journal Citation Report (JCR) and propose a suite of services built around the Web of Science, directed to the needs of journal editors and publishers.
Rearguard and Vanguard
The problem of piracy is not easily solved with legal or even technical initiatives. To make piracy less significant, publishers need to create a different kind of content service, one that is resistant to piracy because of its dynamic nature.
Left Behind—Will Proposed Rules in Scholarly Publishing Leave Behind a Population of Researchers?
Lost in the discussions of what open access, open data and public access should look like are the concerns of researchers who are not yet on board with what is being proposed.
The Next Big Things?
Privacy, trust and managing the cultural record bubble to the surface of growing concerns.