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.
Darrell Gunter discusses the great opportunities available in making all forms of content accessible to everyone.
What can academic libraries learn from Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn? The aim of this merger is to collect end-user data from corporate accounts. Libraries are facing a similar situation when publishers develop end-user strategies that compromise the privacy of library patrons.
Jack Ochs from the American Chemical Society discusses the significant increase in cybersecurity threats to both publishers and libraries.
An excellent book about humankind in general holds important fundamental insights for scholarly publishers, editors, and researchers.
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.
When entities like Sci-Hub invite you to share your network credentials in order to help create free access to licensed scholarly publications, they’re asking for more than access to research. What they’re asking for may also give them access to your email account, your course management program, your tax documents, and more. Here are some things to think about before you decide to share that network user ID and password.
Why is it so frustrating and difficult to talk about scholarly-communication reform, and why do those conversations seem to involve virtually all members of the scholcomm ecosystem except for authors?
Journals as communication vehicles that bind communities of practice are still important and well-regarded, but there are external forces changing them and our industry, along with a rising level of neglect, which may mean a harder future for them than ever. What might we lose? And how does this explain why change is so slow in coming?
We’re in a thicket of stories proclaiming “science is broken” and that stealing articles isn’t stealing because, publishers. This cottage industry of journal bashing and science trashing has reached a crescendo. What drives it? And what more important stories are being missed in the maelstrom?
Not only is Sci-Hub pirating STM articles; it also has built a large collection of unauthorized university press monographs. This undermines the argument that Sci-Hub is an activist site fighting against corporate greed, as the university press community typically operates at a deficit. But university presses have many other challenges, and the threat posed by Sci-Hub is not the largest among them.
On an academic campus, the consumer of licensed scholarly information products is usually not the buyer and does not make purchasing decisions. If your sales reps aren’t careful about respecting that distinction, they can get themselves into hot water fast.
A recent blog post by ARL that was ostensibly about “To Kill a Mockingbird” was actually a set piece on the term of copyright. This rhetorical strategy of using news simply as a jumping-off point for a political statement undermines the credibility of public discourse, which hurts us all.
Scale can be achieved by broadly outsourcing the editorial process. Does this lead to a loss in quality control, and is this acceptable?