Stick to Your Ribs: Back to School: Rethinking the Textbook
Revisiting Joe Esposito’s 2011 post on the challenges and the strategies for moving textbooks into the digital era.
Life in a Bubble — The Limitations of Public Access, the Challenges of Public Engagement
Presumptions about the benefits of access fail to take into account the power and difficulty of true engagement with diverse publics.
Well, That Went Fast! A Few Last-Minute Reflections on a Year as President of SSP
Serving as President of SSP for a year let me see how uniquely beneficial this organization is for scholarly publishing.
University Presses: "Under Fire" or Just Under the Gun (Like the Rest of Us)?
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?
A Modest Proposal for Scaled-up Open Access
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.
What Does "Unsustainable" Mean?
We breeze by the statement that “scholarly publishing economics are unsustainable,” without contemplating what it actually means, how deep it goes, and why it has been allowed to get this way.
What Library Directors Are Thinking: An Ithaka S+R Survey Report
Ithaka S+R has just published the latest in its ongoing series of triennial library director surveys, and its findings are interesting and, in some ways, sobering.
The Market for Social Sciences and Humanities Publications
A recent research report from Simba Information analyzes the market for publications in the social sciences and humanities.
Vaccines and Autism — Despite a Widely Publicized Scientific Hoax, Celebrity Continues to Dominate the Evidence
The vaccine-autism papers were a hoax. But a lingering controversy around the diagnosis of a celebrity’s child and her insistence on preserving her version of the facts only shows how stubborn misinformation can be.
The Jack Andraka Story — Uncovering the Hidden Contradictions Behind a Science Folk Hero
The story of a teenage science whiz who used free information sources to create a novel cancer screening test may be full of holes. Whether it is or not, it no longer seems the clear, happy story the media wanted to tell.
The Future (?) of the Scholarly (?) Monograph (?)
As the scholarly communication environment changes, so does the monograph–and the nature of scholarship itself. A few years from now, what will these terms even mean?
Whose Dissertation Is It, Anyway?
Another association of historians has recommended that students be allowed to impose limited embargoes on their dissertations. And so the question arises again: whose work is the dissertation, and who should control it?
The End of an Era for Academia.edu and Other Academic Networks?
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Elsevier has issued a sweeping series of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take down notices regarding Elsevier-published content to Academia.edu, a file-sharing network for researchers and other academics.
This has prompted a storm in the Twittersphere, a response from Elsevier, a number of commentaries on blogs and list-serves, and a truly bizarre article from CNET. Academia.edu for its part is reportedly encouraging authors of affected papers to sign this Elsevier boycott petition despite the fact that their own terms of use prohibit the posting of content that infringes on the copyright or license of publishers such as Elsevier.
Is this a footnote or the end of a chapter in the annals of digital science publishing?
MOOCs and the Cycle of Hype
Thoughts on the future of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC).
Dancing Statistics
A new film series offers a chance to dance your way through statistical analysis.