Peering across the Copyright DMZ
A new book reviews various instances of piracy in the media industry and proposes using Big Data analyses as a means to manage it.
A Quick Tour Around the World of Scholarly Journal Publishing
A presentation to the 2016 ISMTE US Conference. Something of a “state of our industry” overview, or perhaps, everything I needed to know I learned from the other bloggers at The Scholarly Kitchen.
What Is SocArXiv?
A new “papers service” for social science content was recently launched and is capitalizing on concerns over the sale of a long time preprint server by a commercial publisher. While the timing might be right, the set up looks a little hasty.
Detecting (and Stopping) Robot Pirates
Designed to act like humans, pirate robots avoid detection by keeping download requests low, cycling through journals, and jumping from publisher to publisher.
Copyright, Expectations, and Economics — Can Taylor Swift Help Us Find Our Backbone?
Expectations of free content are entrenched, but artists, authors, and publishers are all hurting because of it. The basic problem? It’s leading to a lack of trust in the future.
Guest Post: The American Chemical Society on the Shared Cybersecurity Concerns of Universities and Publishers
Jack Ochs from the American Chemical Society discusses the significant increase in cybersecurity threats to both publishers and libraries.
Scholarly-Communication Reform: Why Is it So Hard to Talk About, and Where are the Authors?
Why is it so frustrating and difficult to talk about scholarly-communication reform, and why do those conversations seem to involve virtually all members of the scholcomm ecosystem except for authors?
If You Can’t Beat ‘Em…Elsevier to Purchase Sci-Hub
Exasperated over ineffectual attempts to shut down Sci-Hub, an illegal article sharing website, Elsevier has decided to purchase the service for an undisclosed sum.
Ask The Chefs: What Is The Biggest Misconception People Have About Scholarly Publishing?
What is the biggest misconception people have about scholarly publishing? That’s what we asked the Chefs this month. Now we’re asking you. What did we miss?
Seven Things Every Researcher Should Know About Scholarly Publishing
After many and long conversations among colleagues within and beyond the Scholarly Kitchen
about what researchers need to know about scholarly publishing, Alice Meadows and Karin Wulf compiled a list of what we think to be the most urgent issues.
Sci-Hub: How Does it Work?
Sci-Hub is a pirate website that enables users to access content that is held behind publisher paywalls. This is how it works.
The Illicit Love Affair between Open Access and Traditional Publishing
At the recent PSP conference there was a panel on the cost of complying with the many new open access mandates from funding bodies. The panel explored the cost of compliance and how to reduce those costs. The current regulatory regime is complicated and administratively expensive, but the mandates will continue to be promulgated because the people calling for them are not the ones that have to implement them.
Guest Post: Kent Anderson UPDATED — 96 Things Publishers Do (2016 Edition)
Kent Anderson returns to update his essential list of just what it is that publishers do.
NYPL Shows Academic Libraries What "Public Domain" Means
The New York Public Library has now opened up hundreds of thousands of their digitized public-domain documents to unrestricted access and reuse, encouraging members the general public to exercise all the rights in those documents that the law gives them. Why aren’t more academic libraries doing the same thing?
The Dissertation Mess: Balancing Rights and Responsibilities
The broad online availability of theses and dissertations creates difficult tensions between the individual rights of authors, the rights of educational institutions, and the responsibilities that both have to global scholarship and the collective good. How can we resolve those tensions?