The Paradox of Online Journals
Online availability of articles may shorten citation window, lead to fewer articles being cited new research suggests.
APA Reverses PubMed Deposit Charge
The American Psychological Association has abruptly halted a policy that would charge $2,500 for archiving in PubMed Central
OA Author’s Fund — 1% Solution, 99% Ideology
We are seeing a publishing model that has roots in cold, hard currency transformed into an idolatry of ideology.
Britannica’s Tepid Move
Image via Wikipedia Forgive me, but I think the recent news that the Encyclopedia Britannica is adopting a modified Wiki approach reveals not a brave embrace of new online realities, but rather a tepid response to the threat they are […]
Office 2007 and Web 2.0 Expo
Over the last year, Microsoft has really engaged with the STM publishing community and has been maintaining a steady dialog on how they can help publishers start to use OOML and the OpenXML (DOCX) format. I had the honor of […]
Crisis? What Crisis?
The “crisis in scholarly communication” makes good narrative.
Information Does(n’t) Want to Be Free
David Pogue just published a post on the New York Times that quotes at its heart the statement, “Information wants to be free.” In the post, he notes that he’s pretty conflicted over the issue, and takes solace in the […]
Volume Is Not Usability
Web metrics are often relied upon simultaneously for two things — commercialization of Web content (selling the page views and ad impressions, or selling site licenses) and analysis of usability issues or user preferences. Using traditional Web metrics for commercialization […]
The Conduit Metaphor
One of the most powerful ways to reimagine the status quo is to engage in lateral thinking. When you combine this practice with the insight that we think and speak in metaphors (even though this is difficult to recognize because […]
Freedom, Secrecy, and Open Access Fuel 2008 Learned Societies Meeting
A recent story in the Chronicle of Higher Education covers the 2008 meeting of the Association of Learned Societies meeting, held last week in Pittsburgh, PA. It’s interesting reading, given the tenor of our times. Academic freedom is a major […]
The Facebook Nightmare Scenario
A great video on YouTube shows what it would be like if Facebook were made real. It’s very funny and a little bawdy by my prudish American standards, so don’t watch with your kids, and turn your speakers down to […]
Web 2.0 — The Vital Echo Chamber
Skeptics keep you honest, and should be celebrated. A skeptic about Web 2.0 is David Crotty, author of the Cold Spring Harbor Protocols blog “Benchmarks.” In a recent post, he pointed me to a review of Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes […]
Free and Not Free: The $500K iPod
Last week, I wrote about the new “racetrack memory” described in a recent Science paper. The commercial application of such high-capacity devices naturally falls toward high-demand media like music and movies. An interesting tangent of this is that while the […]
Is the Age of Anti-Plagiarism Software Upon Us?
Last Friday, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran a story about the emerging anti-plagiarism software marketplace, with CrossRef’s CrossCheck spotlighted. It’s a good story that broadens nicely upon the CrossCheck angle. Defining plagiarism is potentially fraught with difficulty, but it […]
Publishers Sue Georgia State Over Digital Coursepacks
The New York Times broke the news yesterday that Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Sage Publications are suing Georgia State for copyright infringement via distribution of digital coursepacks. Georgia State alleges that their use falls within “fair use,” […]