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?
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.
Technological trends have enabled experiments in publishing. But now that we’ve seen plenty of experiments, is it time to bring them under control?
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 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.
Should attention metrics play any role whatsoever in researcher assessment?
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.
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.
Frontiers issues another statement about why the “Recursive Fury” paper was retracted, raising once again questions about why it was retracted, but shifting the focus more and more to how it was retracted.
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.
Privacy, trust and managing the cultural record bubble to the surface of growing concerns.
Two ways to leverage scarcity in the computer world are worth examining, because they represent baffling new ways for the rich to get richer.
Retracting a paper identifying a link between climate change deniers and conspiracy theorists provokes more conspiracy theories, but it turns out the real impetus for retraction is disappointingly parochial and explicable.
Even with the protections of traditional copyright, an author may lose control of his original work and see it misappropriated and used for hateful ends. So is it any wonder that many authors have concerns about being required to publish under CC-BY?
Public access to research data offers clear benefits for reproducibility in some fields. But in the world of cancer cell biology, complexity reigns, and replicating results is not so easy a process.