Publishing in a Time of Information Warfare — A Wakeup Call
The information war requires changes — new research priorities, new personal and professional boundaries, higher editorial hurdles, and a hardened infrastructure.
A New Scholarly Society is Doing the Urgent Work of the Past
A newly founded scholarly society brings a fresh perspective and offers some useful lessons for engaging the public and researchers alike.
How to Reduce the Cost of College Textbooks
Of the many proposals to lower the cost of college textbooks, the model called “inclusive access” may have the best chance, as it creates incentives for publishers and students alike.
Ebooks, Innovation, and the Rebel Within
In every publishing organization you need a rebel. Robert Harington talks with Peter Krautzberger, project lead for MathJax and rebel, about his views on Web publishing, ebooks and mathematics.
Living with an AI: A Glimpse Into The Future
Artificial intelligence is now a commodity appliance. What are the implications for Scholarly Publishing?
Wither Portable Peer Review
Does the closing of Axios Review portend the end of independent peer review?
Ask The Chefs: If You Could Change One Thing About Scholarly Communication, What Would That Be?
Economics, incentives, public relations, content development, government funding, what would you change in the scholarly communication ecosystem?
The Tyranny of Amusements — Science, Spectacle, and the Lowly PDF
Do scholarly and scientific publishers risk more than they realize when they embrace modern media spectacle and seek to marginalize the PDF?
Why Hindawi Left the STM Association and What It All Means for the Industry
Hindawi recently announced they would no longer be members of the STM association, citing the trade association’s ‘overwhelming focus on protecting business models of the past’. What does this mean for Hindawi and for the industry?
What the Acquisition of Meta Means for Scholarly Publishers
Meta has been acquired by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The arrangement will speed up the pace of scientific research and have an impact on scientific publishing.
The Measure of All Things: Some Notes on CiteScore
Elsevier’s new CiteScore service is a carefully thought-out element in the company’s competitive strategy, but it reinforces the widespread error that bibliometrics can be use as proxies for the quality of a publication.
The Price of Silicon Valley’s "Disruption" — Is It Possible to Now Have Responsible Information Economics?
As we’ve absorbed and adopted the information economy assumptions peddled by Silicon Valley, social isolation has increased, the definition of “fact” has become slippery, and the scientific record has become more superficial, less reliable, and more transitory. In fact, confirmation bias seems to have become our main operating principle. Maybe a change in economic incentives and greater skepticism across the board could help — all driven by more humans at the controls.
Humanities Commons: Networking the Humanities through Open Access, Open Source and Not-for-Profit
The just-launched beta version of Humanities Commons is the latest in a growing number of scholar-led innovations in scholarly communication. How do such innovations develop, and how should more traditional publishers think about these opportunities? I spoke with MLA’s Kathleen Fitzpatrick recently to learn more.
Whither Portable Peer Review?
Three companies (Rubriq, Axios Review, and Peerage of Science) have working models for external peer review. Has any one of them found a model for success?
The Future of Authorship
Dismayed by the loss of trust in facts, and seeming preference for half-truths that appears to be driving our political present, Robert Harington decided to catch up on his reading over the weekend, and stumbled across a stimulating article in Publishers Weekly, entitled How to Sell Nearly a Half-Million Copies of a Poetry Book, by Anisse Gross.