What Should We Make of Secret Open Access Deals?
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: When Is a Feature a Product, and a Product a Business?
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.
Text and Data Mining Are Growing and Publishers Need to Support Their Use – An AAP-PSP Panel Report
During the AAP/PSP annual meeting last week, a panel discussion with representatives of a consortia, a publisher, and a technology provider explored the topic of text and data mining.
What #ColorOurCollections Suggests
Last week’s surprisingly successful social media campaign was a winning event for libraries, archives, and museums.
An Interview with Jeffrey Beall
An interview with librarian and open access skeptic Jeffrey Beall. He discusses his work, the criteria for declaring an organization a “predatory publisher,” and how he would fix the scholarly communications system.
Guest Post: Kent Anderson UPDATED — 96 Things Publishers Do (2016 Edition)
Kent Anderson returns to update his essential list of just what it is that publishers do.
An Interview with Lever Press
An interview with Charles Watkinson, Mike Row, and Mark Edington of the newly-announced Lever Press open access book initiative.
The Network Model of Publishing
One of the unanticipated consequences of the introduction of digital media to scholarly publishing is that publishing properties increasingly are organized into networks, with one property pointing to another for the benefit of all. This essay describes the network publishing model and comments on some of a network’s characteristics and economic opportunities.
NYPL Shows Academic Libraries What "Public Domain" Means
The New York Public Library has now opened up hundreds of thousands of their digitized public-domain documents to unrestricted access and reuse, encouraging members the general public to exercise all the rights in those documents that the law gives them. Why aren’t more academic libraries doing the same thing?
Past, Present and Future: The Book (of Hours)
A centuries old genre of publication — can it inspire tomorrow’s book?
The Knowledge Supply Chain in the Internet Age: Who Decides What Information Is Trustworthy?
Alison Mudditt presents a guest post from Julia Kostova and Patrick Alexander that asks questions about how information is vetted in the digital age, and what role scholarly publishers will continue to play.
What Does "Brand" Mean for Library-based Presses?
Library-based publishing is growing. A recent survey in Australia shows that “increasing visibility of the university brand” is a common objective. Charlie Rapple considers some of the challenges relating to brand for this growing sector.
Mr. Market is a Brilliant Editor
Of the many ways to measure the quality of a publication, one that is often overlooked are the workings of the marketplace itself. Purchases for published material is made in large part on the basis of the quality of that material, making the marketplace something of an editor of genius. This mechanism incorporates all other metrics, from impact factor to altmetrics. Unfortunately, the marketplace is not free to exercise its judgment when many participants seek dominant and even monopolistic control.
The Dissertation Mess: Balancing Rights and Responsibilities
The broad online availability of theses and dissertations creates difficult tensions between the individual rights of authors, the rights of educational institutions, and the responsibilities that both have to global scholarship and the collective good. How can we resolve those tensions?
For Open Access Monographs, Peter Pays Paul. Who Pays Peter?
Gold open access for monographs is based on the notion that provosts will pay for what librarians will not. This seems like an improbable model for scholarly publishing. Publishing that is not based on end-user demand is not likely to have strong support in lean times.