Not only is Sci-Hub pirating STM articles; it also has built a large collection of unauthorized university press monographs. This undermines the argument that Sci-Hub is an activist site fighting against corporate greed, as the university press community typically operates at a deficit. But university presses have many other challenges, and the threat posed by Sci-Hub is not the largest among them.
On an academic campus, the consumer of licensed scholarly information products is usually not the buyer and does not make purchasing decisions. If your sales reps aren’t careful about respecting that distinction, they can get themselves into hot water fast.
There continue to be calls to consolidate all publishing activity in a single organization or unit. The various participants in scholarly communications often are hostile to the very idea of competition. But the evidence is otherwise: a diversity of publishing venues, all operated independently, yield better and more innovative results.
Although journals, other serials, and reference have made a large scale transition away from print, we must not assume that the same path will inevitably be pursued for other components of collections. A combination of business models, reading practices, and other user needs will play the biggest role in determining the prospects for the printed monograph. Today, it seems that a dual-format environment may remain before us for some time, and there will be advantages for the libraries, publishers, and intermediaries that can develop models for monographs that work best in such an environment.
A new survey looks at the ways readers discover scholarly publications. Due to methodological limitations, scholarly information professionals should practice caution in interpreting the findings and considering potential business responses. Ultimately, it is impressive that the researchers have taken on such a large-scale study, which adds some additional context to our understanding of discovery, especially in its diversity.
The “crisis in scholarly communication” story is not entirely supported by Association of Research Libraries (ARL) data. Why do we cling to the victim-hero narrative when alternatives exist?
University presses are enjoying something of a renaissance in the UK, as was evident at the recent University Press Redux conference in Liverpool. Why is this, and how are presses trying to reconcile mission, innovation and sustainability in the digital world? And what can they teach the rest of us?
After many and long conversations among colleagues within and beyond the Scholarly Kitchen
about what researchers need to know about scholarly publishing, Alice Meadows and Karin Wulf compiled a list of what we think to be the most urgent issues.
There seems to be a significant disagreement between academic libraries and their own host institutions with regard to an important rule change proposed by the Department of Education. That disagreement has implications that go way beyond the rule itself.
Robert Harington comments on a New York Times article by Kate Murphy , published on Sunday 13th March, 2016, suggesting that when journalists write such an article they, do not fan the flames of fundamentalism, recognize the complexity at hand, and understand that there is a constructive debate to be had.
Revisiting Kent Anderson’s 2013 post discussing a study on library spending that suggests that the costs of journals have not increased as much as is commonly claimed, and that the increases seen are due to the increased volume being published.
Last week, the news broke about a new service called DOAI that is designed to support open access. It is not a publishing model or a repository but rather a type of infrastructure. When a user inputs a DOI, DOAI connects […]
Robert Harington asks Tim Collins for his views on publishing industry trends seen through the prism of his leadership role at EBSCO, exploring Tim’s sense of a connected world of stakeholders in today’s publishing industry.
A spate of open access “big deals” marks a shift from global offsetting to local offsetting. But the secretive nature of these deals makes them difficult to interpret.
Revisiting Joe Esposito’s post on distinguishing between features, products, and businesses. Not all features can become full-fledged businesses. Sometimes the best business case for a feature is to link it to an established business, where it adds value to assets that are already in place.