Scientific Reports Overtakes PLOS ONE As Largest Megajournal
The open access megajournal is a proven success, but its future may lie in the hands of commercial entities.
The Danger of Face Validity
Hypotheses that flatter our own preconceptions and biases are incredibly seductive, and the temptation to accept them at face value can be nearly irresistible. But in a world that seems to be drifting away from analytical rigor and fact-based decision-making, the ability to resist that temptation is more essential than ever.
Citation Cartel Or Editor Gone Rogue?
How much can a single editor distort the citation record? Investigation documents rogue editor’s coercion of authors to cite his journal, papers.
Predatory Publishing as a Rational Response to Poorly Governed Academic Incentives
Are we thinking about predatory publishing the wrong way? Are researchers deliberately choosing these journals, and if so, what are the incentives driving this decision?
Supply, Demand, and the Subscription Model in Scholarly Publishing — An Analysis
An overview of usage trends across libraries and journals indicates that usage is generally stable or up, archives remain of interest, and consumption doesn’t align with authorship or funding.
Guest Post, Joshua Piker: Comparing Apples and Oranges, Floors and Ceilings in Digital Scholarship
Online content v. traditional scholarly genres? Guest Joshua Piker walks us through a comparison of views and downloads, looking and reading.
How Many Grains of Salt Must We Take When Looking at Metrics?
In the quest to measure everything, authors are now presented with all kinds of metrics. This post reviews common sources for citation, attention, and usage metrics. Not all the tools are up for the job leaving authors wondering how to quantify the impact of their work.
Have You Looked At This? Nuzzel.com
It was named as one of the top apps of 2016 by both The New York Times and Time magazine. But what makes it cool?
What the Acquisition of Meta Means for Scholarly Publishers
Meta has been acquired by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The arrangement will speed up the pace of scientific research and have an impact on scientific publishing.
Plum Goes Orange – Elsevier Acquires Plum Analytics
Thoughts on Elsevier’s acquisition of Plum Analytics.
Carving Out a Content Discovery Strategy
Publishers often struggle to keep pace with content discovery demands. Emerald’s user-centered discoverability strategy provides some important lessons in how publishers might adopt a more deliberate, evidence-based approach to facilitating scholarly information seeking and retrieval.
COUNTER Prepares Release 5 of its Code of Practice
An interview with the team behind the new Release 5 of the COUNTER Code of Practice.
Journals and Politicians — A Marriage for Mutual Benefit? Or a Temporary Alignment of Interests?
President Obama has published three articles in six months in three of the world’s most prestigious scholarly journals. Is it appropriate? With these precedents, what happens when the politics of the President conflicts with the politics of science?
The Measure of All Things: Some Notes on CiteScore
Elsevier’s new CiteScore service is a carefully thought-out element in the company’s competitive strategy, but it reinforces the widespread error that bibliometrics can be use as proxies for the quality of a publication.
STM Week 2016 — Stray Thoughts on Security, Open Access, and Data
A few take-aways from STM Week, including London Information International — why publishers have to take security seriously, why OA may need to itself be disrupted, and why we might want to rethink the “content business” positioning we have.