On Friday, Highwire Press announced that it has received a “significant equity investment to support its strategic growth from Accel-KKR” and that it would be spinning off from the Stanford University Library, which has been its home for nearly 20 years. This post explores the implications of the transition.
The New York Times’ “Innovation” Report will hit a lot of nerves when it comes to strategy, long-term transformation, investment, digital operations, silos, print legacy, and organizational culture. And it will remind you how barely contained panic looks to others.
Shorter deadlines, email reminders, and cash incentives can speed up the peer review process and minimize unintended effects, a recent study suggests. Can it work for other disciplines?
The bias against printing has a technological basis and some business rationale, but are we underserving our role as “content marketers” by shutting down this option out of hand?
Are university presses really “under fire,” or are they simply experiencing the natural consequences of doing the wrong things at the wrong time in a marketplace that has evolved away from them?
While we fuss over our interfaces and capabilities, we often forget how difficult software is to create and sustain, how easy it is to imagine otherwise, and how scarce engineering and programming resources are across the board.
Technological trends have enabled experiments in publishing. But now that we’ve seen plenty of experiments, is it time to bring them under control?
In the midst of a couple of major projects, here are some top-of-mind lessons from cultivating and sharing ideas on the long road of innovation.
The news function of journals has many dimensions, a major one consisting of where and when an article is published.
A new white paper by K|N Consulting offers an intriguing blueprint for an Open Access journal publishing system at mass scale, one built on a three-way partnership between publishers, libraries, and higher-education institutions. It suggests interesting possibilities and raises equally interesting questions.
The world of journals publishing is constantly changing, and one relatively new entrant is the library as publisher. There is a need to study and publish these programs in order to optimize their performance.
It’s unclear who in the academic world has any incentive to pay for Gold OA publishing, especially as embargoes satisfy nearly everyone and cost next to nothing.
The UK’s National Trust owns 140 libraries containing hundreds of thousands of volumes, many of them in the public domain. What would it take to make those books available to the public that owns them?
Two ways to leverage scarcity in the computer world are worth examining, because they represent baffling new ways for the rich to get richer.
University presses cite a number of reasons to sell books directly to end-users. The principal reason is to establish a relationship with the customer. But once that relationship has been initiated, what business purpose does it serve?