Independence Lost — Taxpayer Funding and Information Access Take a Dark Turn
We once assumed taxpayer-funding meant information availability. The new US government is now actively hiding scientific data, imperiling our understanding of the world.
Data Visualization and Scale
A clever visualization that makes it easier to understand statistics about human populations be reducing their scale.
Reproducible Research, Just Not Reproducible By You
What happens when an experiment is correct, but it’s really hard to replicate? Are there research results that are accurate but not reproducible?
Feel the FORCE(11): An Interview with Cameron Neylon
Although just a few years old, FORCE11 has already established itself as a major force in scholarly communications To coincide with its recently launched Scholarly Communications Institute – a summer school for researchers, librarians, publishers, university and research administration, funders, students, and post docs – Scholarly Kitchen interviewed its President, Cameron Neylon.
What Constitutes Peer Review of Data? A Survey of Peer Review Guidelines
What constitutes peer review of a data set?
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.
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.
What the Acquisition of Meta Means for Scholarly Publishers
Meta has been acquired by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The arrangement will speed up the pace of scientific research and have an impact on scientific publishing.
University Press Books We Loved in 2016
As a follow-up to the chef’s best books read during 2016, I’m happy to present a selection of our favorite university press reads of 2016 (and thanks to one of our commenters for the suggestion!). We tend to think of […]
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.
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.
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 Painful (but True-to-life) Look at Data Availability and Reuse
A cautionary tale on how difficult it can be to obtain another researcher’s published data.
Why Technology Will Not Get Cheaper
The long-desired hope that digital publishing will be cheaper gets more cold water, as infrastructure and personnel costs continue to rise, with no real end in sight.
Old Media, New Media, Data Media: Evolving Publishing Paradigms
We typically classify publishers as Old Media and New Media, but now we have companies that are part of a new paradigm, the Dat Media company. Such companies sit above both Old and New, studying patterns in usage and in the databases of information aggregated by publishers.