2015 has already started with a bang and we think there’s more to come, as you’ll see from the Chef’s responses to the question: What do you think will have the biggest impact on scholarly publishing in 2015?
Publishers have to distinguish between features, products, and businesses. Not all features can become full-fledged businesses. Sometimes the best business case for a feature is to link it to an established business, where it adds value to assets that are already in place.
The Academic Publishing in Europe (APE) meeting in Europe is 10 years old, but feels as fresh and frisky as some of the meetings in the US used to. This report touches on some of the most interesting threads of two days’ worth of interesting presentations and conversations.
The University of California Press has announced two new open access publishing initiatives, one a monographs program and the other an OA mega journal. Here UCP director Alison Mudditt answers some questions posed by the Kitchen about these new initiatives.
The merger of Macmillan and Springer holds many lessons and some interesting twists. More than anything, it indicates a future in which scale continues to confer advantages.
Fifteen years later, the authors of the “Cluetrain Manifesto” attempt a relevant update, with 112 new “clues.” Yet, they miss the biggest clue of all — the Internet is no longer sacred and its users know it.
We are likely to see increased mergers and acquisitions activity in the publishing world this year, and scholarly publishing is not exempt from this. There are many reasons for this, including such fundamental factors as low interest rates, but one reason is the growth of open access mandates from funding agencies, which is disrupting the way many organizations do business.
A Spanish court’s decision around Google News suggests that the barter arrangement with Google and other general search engines — in which they pay nothing to license our content — may have a more viable financial future.
The emerging spectre of cyberwar and cyberterror has real implications for academic and scientific publishers, who already deal with the side effects and may become targets in the future.
A recent study finds that academic press offices exaggerate claims in their press releases about published research. Worse, the vast majority of these find their way into subsequent reporting.
Flickr users were enraged when the company tried to reuse their CC BY licensed photographs by selling prints. This once again points out the confusion that content creators have regarding copyright and what the various CC licenses really mean.
A new report, commissioned by London Higher and SPARC Europe, tries to quantify the costs undertaken by UK higher education and public sector research institutions in complying with open access mandates. The resulting numbers are quite interesting.
Publishers often slap labels on activities that are complex, expensive, and high-value. Worse, we often accept people calling these activities “value-add” when they are core functions of how scientific information shared.
Are we all talking about the same thing when we say “open access” — and do we all mean the same thing when we talk about an “open access future”? Short answers: “yes (kind of)” and “no way.”
We were wrong to expect that online publishing would be cheaper and simpler than print. Acknowledging that, and facing the slower, more complicated commercial world it has created, could put us on a better path.