Well, That Went Fast! A Few Last-Minute Reflections on a Year as President of SSP
Serving as President of SSP for a year let me see how uniquely beneficial this organization is for scholarly publishing.
Open Access: Fundamentals to Fundamentalists
There is a certain fundamentalism that pervades discussions around open access policies and business models. On the one hand there are the advocates, and through the laws of conservation of energy, the equal and opposite reaction of anti-open access advocacy. There seems little room for rational debate about open access in the midst of such an antagonistic atmosphere.This post asks us to spend our time thinking through a range of open access models, experimenting and refining, rather than forcing ourselves down the road of policy mandates that potentially discourage innovation.
University Presses: "Under Fire" or Just Under the Gun (Like the Rest of Us)?
Are university presses really “under fire,” or are they simply experiencing the natural consequences of doing the wrong things at the wrong time in a marketplace that has evolved away from them?
Build a Better Mousetrap
The best way to increase D2C sales is to work in increasing the traffic to your site. Without traffic, there can be few sales. Unfortunately, the university press community has paid little attention to building Web traffic.
A Modest Proposal for Scaled-up Open Access
A new white paper by K|N Consulting offers an intriguing blueprint for an Open Access journal publishing system at mass scale, one built on a three-way partnership between publishers, libraries, and higher-education institutions. It suggests interesting possibilities and raises equally interesting questions.
The Evolving Ecosystem for Journals Publishing
The world of journals publishing is constantly changing, and one relatively new entrant is the library as publisher. There is a need to study and publish these programs in order to optimize their performance.
The Next Big Things?
Privacy, trust and managing the cultural record bubble to the surface of growing concerns.
Public Access to Public Books: The Case of the National Trust
The UK’s National Trust owns 140 libraries containing hundreds of thousands of volumes, many of them in the public domain. What would it take to make those books available to the public that owns them?
Oxford Commas to Perform at ALA Meeting
Something to look forward to at this year’s ALA meeting.
What Does "Unsustainable" Mean?
We breeze by the statement that “scholarly publishing economics are unsustainable,” without contemplating what it actually means, how deep it goes, and why it has been allowed to get this way.
What Library Directors Are Thinking: An Ithaka S+R Survey Report
Ithaka S+R has just published the latest in its ongoing series of triennial library director surveys, and its findings are interesting and, in some ways, sobering.
Privacy and the University Press
As university presses become more involved with D2C marketing, they are going to confront the need for clearly articulated privacy policies. The time to put those policies in place is now.
Occam's Reader: An Interview
Interlibrary loan is a complex and difficult issue in the realm of ebooks. A new tool called Occam’s Reader hopes to simplify the process for libraries, provide better service to users, and reassure publishers worried about rights management.
Inadvertent Innovation
While we usually think of innovators as visionaries with big ideas that challenge the very assumptions of the way we conduct our lives, many innovations seem to happen almost by accident. The challenge is how to make these accidents occur more often and to benefit from them.
SCOAP3 Lifts Off: An Interview with Ann Okerson
Ann Okerson is the National Contact Person for SCOAP3, a partnership aimed at converting high energy physics journals to an open access model.