Paying for Compliance: A Potential Path Forward for Institutional Repositories
A pilot between Elsevier and the University of Florida suggests solutions for long-running failings of institutional repositories.
Copyright, Expectations, and Economics — Can Taylor Swift Help Us Find Our Backbone?
Expectations of free content are entrenched, but artists, authors, and publishers are all hurting because of it. The basic problem? It’s leading to a lack of trust in the future.
Libraries May Have Gotten the Privacy Thing All Wrong
What can academic libraries learn from Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn? The aim of this merger is to collect end-user data from corporate accounts. Libraries are facing a similar situation when publishers develop end-user strategies that compromise the privacy of library patrons.
Rethinking Authentication, Revamping the Business
IP authentication is the most important mechanism for authorizing access to licensed e-resources resources. Substantial business and policy issues for libraries and publishers alike connect up to IP authentication. Today, there is substantial interest in eliminating IP authentication, so it is timely to examine the implications if we were soon to see its end.
Ask The Librarians: What Did You Learn At This Year’s SSP Annual Meeting?
Hillary Corbett, the Director of Scholarly Communication & Digital Publishing at Northeastern University, and Charlotte Roh, the Scholarly Communications Librarian at the University of San Francisco, tell us what they learned at this year’s SSP Annual Meeting!
Guest Post: The American Chemical Society on the Shared Cybersecurity Concerns of Universities and Publishers
Jack Ochs from the American Chemical Society discusses the significant increase in cybersecurity threats to both publishers and libraries.
Vitamins, Painkillers, and the Entrepreneurial Library
What does it mean for libraries to be competitive and “entrepreneurial”? And is the very concept a Trojan horse for neoliberalism? Does it matter?
Watching and Documenting An Evolving Scholarly Record
What will scholarly output become? Jill O’Neill, with co-contributors Constance Malpas and Brian Lavoie of OCLC, looks at the evolving scholarly record.
Update on a Library Research Project
Preliminary results on a research project on library acquisitions are now in. They suggest some interesting patterns in collection-building; the data from this project will be useful for other researchers. It is hoped that the full roll-out of this project will take place later this year.
The Society Publisher at the STM Conference
A special day was set aside at the recent International STM Association conference in Washington to discuss society publishing. One panel included the head of three society publishing operations, all of which are different and all of them successful. The panelists shared their strategies with the audience. The presentations are linked to from within the post.
Publishing, Politics and Reason
Robert Harington grapples with the lack of understanding by the publishing elites on all sides of shifting ideologies of an individual’s relationship to information on the web.
Sci-Hub and Academic Identity Theft: An Open Letter to University Faculty Everywhere
When entities like Sci-Hub invite you to share your network credentials in order to help create free access to licensed scholarly publications, they’re asking for more than access to research. What they’re asking for may also give them access to your email account, your course management program, your tax documents, and more. Here are some things to think about before you decide to share that network user ID and password.
Elsevier Acquires SSRN
Today, Elsevier is announcing that it has acquired SSRN, the preprint and publishing community that focuses on social sciences and law. Among other things, the SSRN acquisition is another step in Elsevier’s path towards data and analytics. In a number of ways, Mendeley is the linchpin for this acquisition. More generally, this acquisition plainly indicates Elsevier’s interest in the open access repository space. Finally, universities, their libraries, and other publishers, should have on their minds some of the policy and governance issues around the data that Elsevier is accumulating and the uses to which they may be put.
Scholarly-Communication Reform: Why Is it So Hard to Talk About, and Where are the Authors?
Why is it so frustrating and difficult to talk about scholarly-communication reform, and why do those conversations seem to involve virtually all members of the scholcomm ecosystem except for authors?
The Open Scholarship Initiative: Talking a Good Game, But Can We Deliver?
A look back at the recent Open Scholarship Initiative conference, from several Scholarly Kitchen “Chefs” who attended.