An Interview with Lever Press
An interview with Charles Watkinson, Mike Row, and Mark Edington of the newly-announced Lever Press open access book initiative.
Open Data and Trust in the Literature
A short film on the need for accurate statistical analysis and data availability.
Incremental Improvements Start With A/B Testing
Why do publishers and platform providers spend so little time seeking incremental improvements?
Dear Joe: Not-for-profit Publishers in “The Economy”
Robert Harington discusses Joe Esposito’s Scholarly Kitchen article from June 2015, entitled “The Mixed Marriage of For-profit and Not-for-Profit Publishing”, in context of his own experiences in the world of society publishing.
Under the Microscope
A look at the winners in this year’s Nikon Small World imaging competition.
MOOCs Rise from the Ashes
The MOOCs seem to have faded from view. In large part this is because they were so relentlessly overhyped when they first appeared. But now various forms of online education have begun to get traction in the marketplace. An essay by Clay Shirky points out how online education is operating today and its implications for higher education.
Space Travel in Layman's Terms
Can you explain a complex scientific process using only the most common 1,000 words in our language?
Virtual Reality and the Scholarly Publisher
This time, Virtual Reality is not a gimmick. This post summarises my investigations and thoughts on the possibilities for VR in the context of scholarly publishing. Plus there’s a quick primer to get you started.
Guest Post: CCC’s Roy Kaufman on Growing Your Open Access Business in an Environment of Peak APC Pricing
CCC’s Roy Kaufman looks at the economic difficulties of the gold open access market, and suggest other pathways for revenue expansion.
People Make the Difference: Steering a Start-up to Success
A panel at the Charleston conference featured three CEOs of start-ups, who shared their experiences in creating and running a completely new organization. All of these companies are computationally sophisticated, so advanced technologically that it is hard to image established companies taking on their challenges. Another common theme is the importance of hiring and retaining the very best people, a matter in which start-up CEOs tend to be obsessive.
Another Big Win for Google Books (and for Researchers)
Google wins in court (again) as the Second Circuit of Appeals rules that its mass book digitization program qualifies as fair use. But Google is a commercial entity! And their files might get hacked! And their library partners are even more susceptible to copyright pirates than Google is! Yes, said the court, but. . .
Celebrating Five Years of Altmetrics
Charlie Rapple reports on the 2:AM conference, which celebrated five years of altmetrics and considered what we should aspire to achieve in the next five years
The Impact of Color
A video showing how filmmakers use color to evoke an emotional response from an audience.
What is an Academic Journal?
We spend much time these days wondering when the academic journal as we know it will cease to exist. Robert Harington discusses the role of the journal in light of a fascinating new venture in the field of mathematics – the overlay journal Discrete Analysis.
Proof of Concept, Proof of Program, and Proof of Scale in Scholarly Communication
New scholarly-communication initiatives have to do more than just demonstrate proof of concept: they have to demonstrate ongoing sustainability (what we might call “proof of program”) and the ability to create desirable products in the amounts needed (what we might call “proof of scale”). What do these look like when they’re achieved, and how are some recent initiatives doing?