Succession Planning
Robert Harington attempts to help you think through how to develop a strategy for succession planning, recognizing that in today’s world, people just don’t stay at their jobs as long as they used to.
Publishing in a Time of Information Warfare — A Wakeup Call
The information war requires changes — new research priorities, new personal and professional boundaries, higher editorial hurdles, and a hardened infrastructure.
Revisiting: Governance and the Not-for-profit Publisher
Revisiting Joe Esposito’s 2011 post to think about why commercial publishers continue to dominate the landscape.
The Tincture of Time — Should Journals Return to Slower Publishing Practices?
Most journals have adopted rapid publication processes, but with the rise of preprint servers and new trends among readers, maybe they can return to a slower, more considered pace.
Publishers, Libraries, and the Food Chain
This is a presentation on consolidation in scholarly communications. It provides a primer on how companies look at acquisitions, how they are financed, and why they are likely to continue. The presentation also touches on start-ups and venture capital.
Some Reflections on Professional and Academic Books
Some notes on academic publishing, university presses in particular.
Who Has All the Content?
Several services attempt to gather up “all” of the content across publishers. This post provides an overview and taxonomy.
Supply, Demand, and the Subscription Model in Scholarly Publishing — An Analysis
An overview of usage trends across libraries and journals indicates that usage is generally stable or up, archives remain of interest, and consumption doesn’t align with authorship or funding.
The Forbidden Forecast: Thinking About Open Access and Library Subscriptions
Green OA has not had a significant effect on subscriptions. What does — and doesn’t — that mean for subscriptions in the future?
Diversity in the Open Access Movement, Part 2: Differing Goals
What, if anything, should be done about the fact that the Open Access movement embraces not only a variety of definitions of the term “open access,” but also a diversity of visions as to what constitutes an acceptable future for access to scholarship?
Diversity in the Open Access Movement, Part 1: Differing Definitions
Fifteen years after the term was coined, we still don’t have a single agreed-upon definition of Open Access (OA). What are the implications of this diversity of views within the OA movement, and how much does it really matter?
The Measure of All Things: Some Notes on CiteScore
Elsevier’s new CiteScore service is a carefully thought-out element in the company’s competitive strategy, but it reinforces the widespread error that bibliometrics can be use as proxies for the quality of a publication.
The Price of Silicon Valley’s "Disruption" — Is It Possible to Now Have Responsible Information Economics?
As we’ve absorbed and adopted the information economy assumptions peddled by Silicon Valley, social isolation has increased, the definition of “fact” has become slippery, and the scientific record has become more superficial, less reliable, and more transitory. In fact, confirmation bias seems to have become our main operating principle. Maybe a change in economic incentives and greater skepticism across the board could help — all driven by more humans at the controls.
STM Week 2016 — Stray Thoughts on Security, Open Access, and Data
A few take-aways from STM Week, including London Information International — why publishers have to take security seriously, why OA may need to itself be disrupted, and why we might want to rethink the “content business” positioning we have.
What We Tell Society Publishers About Open Access
We are often called upon to discuss open access to society publishers. This is what we tell them.