CiteScore–Flawed But Still A Game Changer
The real innovation of CiteScore is not another performance metric, but a new marketing model focused on editors.
Revisiting: Why Publishers’ Brands Matter
Revisiting Joe Esposito’s 2010 post on the role publishers’ brands play in purchasing decisions.
Managing the Cost Burden — Is the Pendulum Swinging Back to the Individual Market?
The pendulum for revenues swung from personal subscriptions to institutional subscriptions with the rise of digital options. With growth capped, a new mix of access options is likely to emerge.
Can An Algorithm Outperform Science Editors?
Artificial intelligence outperformed human editors in selecting high-impact papers, a Canadian software company claims. Really? Then show me the paper!
Revisiting: The Editorial Fallacy
Revisiting Joe Esposito’s 2010 post on the disruptive publishing environment, in which publishers cannot rely on a purely editorial strategy, as many of the issues now facing them are not editorial in nature.
Ripe for Disruption – From Within?
What do people mean when they say scholarly publishing is “ripe for disruption”? Where might such disruption come from, and what will drive its success?
APCs and Competition: What Shulenberger Got Wrong
Would a systemwide “flip” to open access by means of universal article-processing charges work? David Shulenberger argues that it would not, and he may be right — but not for the reasons he gives.
Caught in the Middle — Can Publishers Resolve Contradictory Expectations?
A session at ALPSP shines a light on why publishers are caught in an impossible situation — satisfying customers who demand different things at different times, and who are not aligned around the ultimate benefit they all seek to deliver.
Book Review — The Traps of Big Data Revealed in "Weapons of Math Destruction" by Cathy O’Neil
The new book, “Weapons of Math Destruction,” calls out many worrying trends in the application of big data, with particularly salient entries on higher education rankings, for-profit universities, the justice system, insurance, and employment.
Annual Reports — What Do They Actually Tell Us?
Annual reports from publishing organizations always have a marketing slant, even when they are required filings with governmental bodies. But some are more marketing-oriented than others, and should not be mistaken for transparency, but rather tend toward rationalization. eLife’s recent report, challenging others to be as transparent, is itself opaque and purposeful.
Coming Soon: Battles Over Academic Privacy — But Is This Fight Already Over?
How much is the privacy of academics worth? Judging by the behavior of most people, seemingly very little.
For Scholarly Communications, Double-dipping is Double the Fun
The much-maligned practice of “double-dipping,” in which a publisher received revenue from both subscriptions and APCs, is likely to remain with us for some time, as publishers learn to turn APCs into larger and more varied revenue streams, even as they create the impression that the APCs offset subscription costs.
Ask The Chefs: What is The Role of Social Media in Scholarly Publishing?
The role of social media in scholarly communications is a continuous debate. Is there value? See what the Chefs have to say and then let us know what you think!
Optical Illusions — Shifting to Citation Distributions Only Makes It Easier to Fool the Eye
A proposal to substitute graphs of citation distributions for impact factors introduces many problems the authors don’t seem to have fully grasped, including unintentionally bolstering the importance of the very metric they seek to diminish.
Textbooks in Academic Libraries: The Publisher’s Case
This post presents a case for why publishers would want to participate in a program to sell textbooks to academic libraries. The plan would include a means for publishers to retain their profitability, albeit on a lower sales volume, by taking advantage of digital technology and by “repairing” some broken elements in the current marketplace, e.g., the market for used and pirated books.