New scholarly-communication initiatives have to do more than just demonstrate proof of concept: they have to demonstrate ongoing sustainability (what we might call “proof of program”) and the ability to create desirable products in the amounts needed (what we might call “proof of scale”). What do these look like when they’re achieved, and how are some recent initiatives doing?
Libraries increasingly provide a wide range of publishing activities, but are there some areas where libraries are not active? It appears that libraries are unlikely to play a large role in publishing that is based on end-user demand.
We often hear that the majority of open access journals charge authors no fee for publication. Is that true? Well, it depends on how you count journals.
Amazon was recently criticized harshly in an article in the New York Times. The piece raises the question of whether the hard-charging culture of the tech industry is what we want.
A number of recent articles have posited the idea that information distribution on the Internet is undergoing a massive change – driven by the failure of site advertising and subscriptions as a general purpose economic model, and the rise of mobile powered social media as the discovery tool of these times. To what extent is this way of thinking applicable to scholarly publishing?
Predatory publishing is a big and complex problem; so is calling out and shaming deceptive publishers by means of blacklisting. Is that something we should even do, and can it be done fairly, constructively, and helpfully? Yes, and here are some suggestions how.
A recent article about the publishing industry confuses the various business segments and offers prescriptions that are largely irrelevant to the task of running a publishing enterprise.
How do shifts in cultural and economic views on social behavior affect the decision of a student, or researcher when deciding whether or not to join a relevant academic society? What social and economic forces are involved in an academic’s collaborative life, publishing life, and teaching life? Robert Harington delves into a fascinating report from the World Bank, entitled World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society and Behavior and its relevance for publishing and academia.
Is access to the research paper really the same thing as access to the research results themselves? Are funding agencies creating a false equivalency by confusing the two? And does this confusion favor researchers in some fields over others? Revisiting a 2013 post to re-examine these questions.
EBSCO is now, through the acquisition of YBP, the largest vendor to academic libraries of both serials and books. This is the beginning of a gatekeeper strategy, which will put EBSCO in a position to mediate a large proportion of the arrangements between publishers and libraries.
Smaller independent and society publishers are finding it increasingly difficult to compete with the economies of scale around production, technology, and (most important) institutional sales that can be brought to bear by a large publisher. If you are a society that has been self-publishing for many decades, such effects may appear as only a recent headwind in a long publishing tradition. This headwind, however, is most likely not a temporary zephyr but rather a permanent fixture of the STM and scholarly publishing landscape, and one that will only increase in intensity. To understand why, it is helpful to look at the two vectors on which scale operates in STM and scholarly publishing: horizontal and vertical. While horizontal scale has long been the province of commercial publishers, society publishers are typically organized to take advantage of vertical scale. The headwinds are presently blowing along the horizontal plane, from the perspective of the society publisher.
Scholarly publishing is virtually unique in that it has significant representation by both for-profit and not-for-profit publishers. This alters the very nature of this segment of publishing, making the not-for-profits more business-like and forcing the for-profits to behave at times like mission-based organizations.
Rick Anderson interviews Deni Auclair, VP and Lead Analyst for Outsell Inc., about the recently published report “Open Access 2015: Market Size, Share, Forecast, and Trends.”
Digital media enables us to collect a huge amount of end-user data, far more than we could gather for print publishing. This presentation summarizes the way that data can be used to foster growth and concludes that end-user data is likely to require the creation of a new class of products.
There are countless proposals for a new “system” for scholarly communications, but such plans are typically top-down and overlook all the creative initiatives by individuals working independently.