Validating Author Services Providers: Q&A with Donald Samulack
A proposed coalition aims to help authors identify reputable service providers. In this Q&A with Donald Samulack, the justification and way forward for such an effort is discussed.
Amazon and the Future of Work
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.
Deceptive Publishing: Why We Need a Blacklist, and Some Suggestions on How to Do It Right
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.
Elephants and the Internet: Online Forgetting
Should kids be helped to delete evidence of indiscretion, or should they stop posting such evidence in the first place? Charlie Rapple considers the new iRights campaign
Advocacy, Analysis, and the Vital Importance of Discriminating Between Them
As the scholarly communication world becomes more complex and the issues we deal with become more politically and emotionally fraught, it becomes increasingly essential that we be able to tell the difference between anlaysis and advocacy. What markers can we look for to help us discriminate between them?
Scholarly Kitchen Podcast: Talking Publication Ethics
A conversation with COPE’s Charlotte Haug.
Surveillance and the Scholarly World: What Shall We Do With The Database of Intentions?
When we talk about impact and metrics and understanding the customer, we are actually talking about surveillance data. We should have an open debate about what this means.
The Mixed Marriage of For-profit and Not-for-profit Publishing
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.
Academia Versus Academia.edu: Should Tech Business Needs Trump Scholarly Culture?
Should the fast and loose rules of startup company business models and the spin-oriented language of advertising be given free rein in the scholarly community?
Should We Retire the Term "Predatory Publishing"?
Those who argue that “predatory” behavior is not only a problem among author-pays OA publishers have a good point. But this raises another question: is the term “predatory” itself really useful in the context of scholarly communication?
Thumbs Down for the Freemium Model? Researchers Reject Nature’s Fast Track Peer Review Experiment
Nature conducts an experiment in paid fast track peer review, and the research community responds with concerns over creating an unfair tiered system for publication.
Ask The Chefs: What is Editorial Independence and How Does It Impact Publishing?
On the surface editorial independence seems so straight-forward. However, it is filled with nuance. If publishing and editorial expectations are not clearly set, misunderstandings can cause angst, poor working relationships, and even legal action.
The ROARMAP Open Access Registry: New and Greatly Improved
ROARMAP, a deeply flawed and often misleading international registry of open access “mandates,” has now been completely revamped–and the result is a much more informative and reliable resource.
Revisiting: The Price of Posting — PubMed Central Spends Most of Its Budget Handling Author Manuscripts
Revisiting Kent Anderson’s post based on his FOIA request documents show that PubMed Central spends most of its money tagging author manuscripts, and that its stricter rules for NIH authors may double its costs.
5 Million Public Domain Ebooks in HathiTrust: What Does This Mean?
The HathiTrust archive now contains 5 million digitized books that are in the public domain and are freely available to all. Do we recognize how significant that is?