The much-maligned practice of “double-dipping,” in which a publisher received revenue from both subscriptions and APCs, is likely to remain with us for some time, as publishers learn to turn APCs into larger and more varied revenue streams, even as they create the impression that the APCs offset subscription costs.
With a new partnership with F1000, Wellcome embraces sketchy peer review standards, deep conflicts of interest, and financial support of a private, commercial enterprise. Worse, the entire thing seems redundant, avoidable, and unnecessary.
This post presents a case for why publishers would want to participate in a program to sell textbooks to academic libraries. The plan would include a means for publishers to retain their profitability, albeit on a lower sales volume, by taking advantage of digital technology and by “repairing” some broken elements in the current marketplace, e.g., the market for used and pirated books.
Has the time come for academic libraries to start thinking seriously about providing textbooks to their student patrons? A few are already doing so–why not more?
University presses are not well positioned to thrive in journal publishing because they have not adopted any of the (relatively few and common) business strategies that are necessary, given market dynamics, for success. I do not put forth this thesis lightly. I have great affection and admiration for university presses, their value — craftsmanship, attention to detail, “getting it right”— and their mission. This is not admiration from afar: I served, in the formative years of my career, at the University of Chicago Press (Chicago), where I learned the tools of the trade and many of the practices and protocols of scholarly publishing still in use today. But after nearly two decades of observing university presses, from within and without, this thesis seems to be inescapable.
Last Monday, the British public defied expectations and narrowly voted to leave the European Union. What will be the consequences for the academic community and scholarly communication. Here we look at just two of the potential issues.
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.
IP authentication is the most important mechanism for authorizing access to licensed e-resources resources. Substantial business and policy issues for libraries and publishers alike connect up to IP authentication. Today, there is substantial interest in eliminating IP authentication, so it is timely to examine the implications if we were soon to see its end.
Hillary Corbett, the Director of Scholarly Communication & Digital Publishing at Northeastern University, and Charlotte Roh, the Scholarly Communications Librarian at the University of San Francisco, tell us what they learned at this year’s SSP Annual Meeting!
An excellent book about humankind in general holds important fundamental insights for scholarly publishers, editors, and researchers.
While it certainly is the case that scholarly publishing is a mature business, some of the companies operating in this industry have found new avenues for growth by expanding beyond the publication of content into data science. This is an opportunity that is only available to the larger companies with enlightened management.
What does it mean for libraries to be competitive and “entrepreneurial”? And is the very concept a Trojan horse for neoliberalism? Does it matter?
The general fragmentation of media and society has profound implications, and may explain to some extent the fragmentation being seen in higher education and scholarly publishing.
It’s a question that has lurked around the edges of our campfire for a while — what if publishers paid authors of research papers? Quickly, it becomes clear why this is very unlikely to happen — for financial, ethical, and practical reasons.
Robert Harington grapples with the lack of understanding by the publishing elites on all sides of shifting ideologies of an individual’s relationship to information on the web.