A presentation to a scientific society on the current environment that STM publishers have to work in. Five issues are identified: regulatory matters, new technology, the structure of the marketplace, competition, and governance.
As we drift into a scholarly economy with centralized payment mechanisms and greater dependence on government funding, are we truly setting ourselves up for long-term independence and success?
The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers recently launched a consultation, requesting feedback from all stakeholders about their draft principles on article sharing on scholarly communication networks. Find out more about how and why these principles are needed and what the consultation hopes to achieve, n this interview with Fred Dylla, Executive Director and CEO of the American Institute of Physics, and project lead for the initiative.
What would it cost for someone to acquire a full set of all peer-reviewed journals, including backfiles? This question was put to a number of experts, but there appears to be no answer to it. We don’t know what everything would cost.
Publishers have underestimated how disruptive mobile technology potentially can be. We are likely to see an entirely new ecosystem develop with the smart phone at the center.
The last remaining lawsuit brought by Edwin Mellen Press founder Herbert Richardson against librarian Dale Askey has now reportedly been settled.
The benefits of personalizing discovery are already playing themselves out in the consumer space, suggesting tremendous opportunities for using data to personalize the research process. Given the scale of data needed for effective personalization, the implications of changing discovery processes will cascade through the scholarly ecosystem.
Publishers have to distinguish 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.
The University of California Press has announced two new open access publishing initiatives, one a monographs program and the other an OA mega journal. Here UCP director Alison Mudditt answers some questions posed by the Kitchen about these new initiatives.
The merger of Macmillan and Springer holds many lessons and some interesting twists. More than anything, it indicates a future in which scale continues to confer advantages.
The administrative burden stemming from funding agency and institutional access policies is just beginning. Can we reduce the severity of this storm with careful planning and collaboration?
There’s no such thing as “too big to fail,” and this applies to libraries as much as it does to car makers, steel companies, and search engines. My guess is that Ozymandias never saw it coming.
Some professional societies need to be persuaded that open access publishing may be in their interest. The best way to do this is to provide data on the publishing ecosystem, including such things as the number of articles of interest to a society that appear in other venues and the practical implications of not having an OA option for prospective authors.
The emerging spectre of cyberwar and cyberterror has real implications for academic and scientific publishers, who already deal with the side effects and may become targets in the future.
In the final part of a series on library publishers, Phill Jones explores the relationship between library publishing and institutional repositories against a background of funder data sharing mandates.