Chefs’ Selections: The Best Books Read During 2012
Once again, the Chefs list their favorite books read this year — everything from Presidents to statisticians to cancer to owl soup. Enjoy!
A Music Video With Important Lessons
Enjoy a laugh and lots of important lessons about how to decrease moronic mortality rates.
A Call for Simplified Tablet Publishing — "The Subcompact Manifesto"
A manifesto urges publishers to make simple, functional, and practical tablet editions, and to avoid the tendency for bloat.
Stretching "Impact" By Many "Factors" — Signs of Thrall and Uncertainty?
As new metrics are explored, not everything equates to “impact.” Getting our terms right will help us get our thinking straight.
As Hybrid Open Access Grows, the Scholarly Community Needs Article-level OA Metadata
With OA gaining momentum and hybrid and full OA policies becoming more common, article-level metadata and other standard approaches are necessary to facilitate discoverability.
Mobile Access — Publishers Must Catch Up With User Adoption Trends
Mobile access is reaching an inflection point, but publisher solutions to mobile access are still lagging.
Metrics and Meaning — Can We Find Relevance and Quality Without Measurements?
Putting metrics and altmetrics into perspective can help us separate secondary signals from primary signals, and may lead to a greater appreciation of alternatives to metrics, or alt2metrics.
A Small Meal — Mini-Cheeseburger Kit Requires Assembly, Only Has 96 Calories
After indulging in Thanksgiving festivities, what better than a small meal, made painstakingly and without all those nasty calories. Best of all, no preservatives!
Hat Tip to the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog — and Lessons from the Trails It Blazed
The recently departed WSJ Health Blog taught us all lessons — and this blogger the lesson of standing up for what is clearly a better way of doing things.
New Media and New Markets — Making Sense of the Possibilities in Publishing
In order to take best advantage of new digital technology, a publisher must identify new places and ways that products can be sold. New media requires new markets or the investment in digital media will simply be an unwelcome additional expense.
Amazon Enhances Its Position in Academic Markets with Launch of Its Whispercast System
Amazon’s new local distribution technology allows academic institutions new levels of control.
What Can Publishers Learn from Indie Rock?
While the recording industry generally gets a bad rap for managing the transition to online distribution, there is one niche that has flipped the model and uses old distribution techniques to sell music across multiple formats. That niche is indie rock and there are some lessons for publishers.
Altmetrics — Replacing the Impact Factor Is Not the Only Point
Framing “altmetrics” as alternative may limit their potential — they have to be “alternative” to something already in existence. How do we move new measures robustly into the mainstream?
The Nano World — Microscopes Show Us the Ants' Willie Wonka Land
Looking closely at nature reveals that our world is a world isolated by its scale, not by its reality. At other scales, other worlds exist.
Math and Discipline — Why Nate Silver's Accuracy Isn't About "Big Data"
“Big data” isn’t what the Nate Silver story highlights. It highlights data curation, management, analysis, publication, iteration, and integrity, none of which “big data” guarantees.