If there was a word of the year competition for Scholarly Publishing, #Altmetrics would be a favorite to win. David Sommer, co-founder and Director of Kudos discusses how this new service could offer usable measurements of the array of article promotion and influencing activities undertaken by scholars.
Our measurements of online advertising and online usage seem concrete and definitive, but they may obscure a larger truth about actual engagement and usage, leading to that subtle distinction between precision and accuracy.
The Internet rewards scale and creates clear competitive disadvantages for niche businesses. Now that a long-term economic downturn has made for starker realities, the effects of this basic set of facts seem inevitable.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Elsevier has issued a sweeping series of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take down notices regarding Elsevier-published content to Academia.edu, a file-sharing network for researchers and other academics.
This has prompted a storm in the Twittersphere, a response from Elsevier, a number of commentaries on blogs and list-serves, and a truly bizarre article from CNET. Academia.edu for its part is reportedly encouraging authors of affected papers to sign this Elsevier boycott petition despite the fact that their own terms of use prohibit the posting of content that infringes on the copyright or license of publishers such as Elsevier.
Is this a footnote or the end of a chapter in the annals of digital science publishing?
The five stages of book publishing outlined here describe the arc as publishers move from the traditional model (where print books were sold mostly in bookstores and to libraries) through a range of developments using online media, culminating in new forms of subscription marketing.
A somewhat strange anonymous letter raises questions, both intentional and unintentional, about the Copyright Clearance Center.
As revenues from alternatives decrease and digital revenue sources prove insufficient, publishers are finding that straight-up asking readers to pay may be the best approach going forward.
What is the role of the Copyright Clearance Center in a digital age?
In a decision that may have deep and wide-ranging implications for the publishing industry and for future applications of the fair use doctrine, Judge Denny Chin has dismissed the Authors Guild’s eight-year-old lawsuit against Google over its Google Books project.
A nostalgic look back in the wake of the shutdown of Blockbuster Video.
Given the pace of technological change, new sources of professional information and community, the increasing competition for attention, shifting demographics, and an uncertain economy, an effective strategy is more important than ever. While most commercial organizations have developed strategic frameworks, and many now have leadership roles dedicated to strategy, not-for-profit organizations tend to focus less on these activities. While some of this “strategy gap” may be due to relative resource scarcity and its associated time pressures , there are also structural and governance issues at play, particularly in the case of professional associations. These challenges are not insurmountable, however. Professional associations can close the strategy gap by incorporating this series of steps into their strategy development and implementation processes.
This is an essay on what it would mean to create a university press that operates at Web scale. It speculates about what such an endeavor would look like and probes some aspects of the financial model.
A long, thoughtful essay by a UK academic contemplating open access merits attention, for obvious and subtle reasons.
A new report from Simba surveys the current scientific and technical publishing markets. These segments are essentially flat. Incumbents are seeking growth elsewhere. Interestingly, open access has not had much of an impact on the revenue of traditional publications.
Using free government infrastructure that’s not available to everyone else raises questions of fairness, which lead to questions of harm. But who is harmed may be both obvious and subtle.