SHARE’s recent summer meeting provided some interesting insights into the organization’s priorities and its ambition to provide a strong, open, and collaborative infrastructure that will maximize the impact of scholarly research. Reasons to be cheerful indeed!
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.
Interstitial publishing, when paired with interstitial reading, is a new form of publishing that aims to take advantage of what previously was viewed as lost time in between primary events during the day. Interstitial publishing seeks ways to create new users by creating content expressly for those brief moments, which heretofore went unexploited for productive aims.
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.
Looking to the future, do membership organizations still fit in? How can they maintain and extend their relevance?
In this episode, Retraction Watch co-founder Ivan Oransky talks with podcast host Michael Clarke about the causes, trends, and problems with retractions of scientific research papers.
Academics’ expectations for user experience are set not by reference to improvements relative to the past but increasingly in comparison with their experiences on consumer internet services and mobile devices. The best solution for research, teaching, and learning would be a single account for each user, controlled by that individual, and accepted portably across services and platforms.
My nominee for a summer reading book, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. This is a humorous book set in San Francisco. It playfully describes the clash between the new technology and the old world of printed books.
Are we in the middle of a start-up boom? And if so, why? Charlie Rapple explores the thoughts and experiences of three very different entrepreneurs to see what they have in common.
Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer, librarians at Utrecht University, talk with podcast host Stewart Wills about their 101 Innovations project.
The Internet operates on a scale unlike anything we have seen before. How must publishing adapt to this scale? This requires more than thinking of the Internet as another format. The scale of the Internet requires us to invite machines into our research and publishing activity.
Publishers and libraries do not completely understand how changing information consumption patterns, especially in the transition to mobile, should affect their product, infrastructure, and acquisitions strategies. Consider enticing or forcing your organization to engage more deeply with the mobile user experience.
The pathways into academic material are diverse and the researcher experiences (RX) are quite variable. How can a publisher best open up its content for discovery?
The university press world is ruminating on its relevance in a broader community that does not always show strong report for press activity. Different presses have identified a number of approaches to the problem of increasing relevance.
Smaller independent and society publishers are finding it increasingly difficult to compete with the economies of scale around production, technology, and (most important) institutional sales that can be brought to bear by a large publisher. If you are a society that has been self-publishing for many decades, such effects may appear as only a recent headwind in a long publishing tradition. This headwind, however, is most likely not a temporary zephyr but rather a permanent fixture of the STM and scholarly publishing landscape, and one that will only increase in intensity. To understand why, it is helpful to look at the two vectors on which scale operates in STM and scholarly publishing: horizontal and vertical. While horizontal scale has long been the province of commercial publishers, society publishers are typically organized to take advantage of vertical scale. The headwinds are presently blowing along the horizontal plane, from the perspective of the society publisher.