Open Access: Fundamentals to Fundamentalists

There is a certain fundamentalism that pervades discussions around open access policies and business models. On the one hand there are the advocates, and through the laws of conservation of energy, the equal and opposite reaction of anti-open access advocacy. There seems little room for rational debate about open access in the midst of such an antagonistic atmosphere.This post asks us to spend our time thinking through a range of open access models, experimenting and refining, rather than forcing ourselves down the road of policy mandates that potentially discourage innovation.

Bears Always Sound Smarter

Discourse about new ideas in publishing can be broken by the appetite to make exquisitely insightful remarks about things to do not yet exist. To work on truly new things, we have to stop performing the role of the skeptic.

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.

Rearguard and Vanguard

The problem of piracy is not easily solved with legal or even technical initiatives. To make piracy less significant, publishers need to create a different kind of content service, one that is resistant to piracy because of its dynamic nature.

When a Scholar is One Among 500, What Does it Mean to be "An Author"?

Last week, an editorial in Nature highlighted the problem of the proliferating number of authors on papers. Following a 2012 symposium at Harvard University, a small group has proposed a taxonomy of contributor roles that would add details to an author list and have tested that among a group of authors. Scholarly publishers should consider adopting this taxonomy to improve the accuracy and granularity to improve attribution and the assignment of credit.

Why Do Publishers Want to Sell Direct?

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?