Guest Post: Alison Mudditt Interviews Geoffry Crossick on An Age of Challenge and Opportunity: The HEFCE Report on Monographs and Open Access
Alison Muddit interviews Goeffrey Crossick about his report on the future of open access monographs.
Return of the Big Brands: How Legacy Publishers Will Coopt Open Access
Open access publishing has gone through a number of stages. Though different people will classify these stages in diverse ways, one way to view this is to say that since the initial period of advocacy for open access, commercial interests have entered this market and are now prepared to augment their positions by leveraging their elite brands, using them, as it were, to draw manuscripts for a family of cascading products.
Restoring a Masterwork
How do you restore a damaged painting? The Metropolitan Museum of Art shows the way.
What is an Academic Journal?
We spend much time these days wondering when the academic journal as we know it will cease to exist. Robert Harington discusses the role of the journal in light of a fascinating new venture in the field of mathematics – the overlay journal Discrete Analysis.
Libraries and Consortia in the Context of a Publisher’s Strategy
Professional societies are facing growing resistance to place their publications in libraries. This results in these societies seeking arrangements with the largest commercial publishers, whose sway with libraries and especially library consortia is significant. Libraries have demonstrated a clear preference to work with the larger publishers over the smaller ones. This leads to increasing concentration and market power in the academic publishing industry.
The Global Gold Open Access "Flip": A Realistic Plan or Magical Thinking?
Is a flip to a Gold OA world as easy as a recent paper suggests?
Proof of Concept, Proof of Program, and Proof of Scale in Scholarly Communication
New scholarly-communication initiatives have to do more than just demonstrate proof of concept: they have to demonstrate ongoing sustainability (what we might call “proof of program”) and the ability to create desirable products in the amounts needed (what we might call “proof of scale”). What do these look like when they’re achieved, and how are some recent initiatives doing?
Viva VIVO! Thinking More Broadly About the Scholarly Communications Infrastructure
Inspired by this year’s VIVO conference, this post looks at why we need a better understanding of how the scholarly research infrastructure works today in order to keep improving it for the future.
Library Publishing Redux: An Unprecedented Example of a Scholar/Library/Publisher Partnership
A collaborative venture between Oxford University Press and the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library exemplifies a new approach to library publishing, one that could be replicated elsewhere with relative ease and that offers potentially huge benefits to scholarship.
What Is “Publishing” if Even a Library Can Do It?
Libraries increasingly provide a wide range of publishing activities, but are there some areas where libraries are not active? It appears that libraries are unlikely to play a large role in publishing that is based on end-user demand.
Altmetrics and Research Assessment: How Not to Let History Repeat Itself
Criticisms of altmetrics often seem to be equally applicable to other forms of research assessment, like the Impact Factor. Phill Jones suggests that is not because of a fundamental opposition to altmetrics but a fear that it will suffer the same pitfalls. The solution is to engage more with a somewhat neglected set of stakeholders; Informaticians.
Reasons to be Cheerful: Some Thoughts on the SHARE Summer 2015 Meeting
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!
Scholarly Kitchen Podcast: Ivan Oransky and Retraction Watch
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.
Scholarly Kitchen Podcast: "101 Innovations" and Scientific Workflow
Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer, librarians at Utrecht University, talk with podcast host Stewart Wills about their 101 Innovations project.
Advocacy, Analysis, and the Vital Importance of Discriminating Between Them
As the scholarly communication world becomes more complex and the issues we deal with become more politically and emotionally fraught, it becomes increasingly essential that we be able to tell the difference between anlaysis and advocacy. What markers can we look for to help us discriminate between them?