The Size of Things (and the Power of a Consistent Frame of Reference)
How does a new visualization of the size of the universe stack up to the classic standard?
How to Manipulate a Citation Histogram
Citation indexes need to provide standardized citation histograms for editors and publishers. Without them, it is unlikely that they will be widely adopted. At worse, it will encourage the production of histograms that selectively highlight or obscure the data.
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.
Will Citation Distributions Reduce Impact Factor Abuses?
Publishing a histogram of a journal’s citation distribution won’t alleviate Impact Factor abuse. At best, it will be ignored. At worse, it will generate confusion.
Detecting (and Stopping) Robot Pirates
Designed to act like humans, pirate robots avoid detection by keeping download requests low, cycling through journals, and jumping from publisher to publisher.
Building a Repository in Partnership with Elsevier: The University of Florida’s Perspective
The University of Florida and Elsevier have entered into a partnership to build links between the institutional repository and ScienceDirect, which has received quite a bit of criticism in recent weeks.I have found it useful to try to understand the different sides of what seems to me to be a debate about how best to utilize the increasingly mature infrastructure and programmatic capacity for scholarly communications.
Libraries May Have Gotten the Privacy Thing All Wrong
What can academic libraries learn from Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn? The aim of this merger is to collect end-user data from corporate accounts. Libraries are facing a similar situation when publishers develop end-user strategies that compromise the privacy of library patrons.
Rethinking Authentication, Revamping the Business
IP authentication is the most important mechanism for authorizing access to licensed e-resources resources. Substantial business and policy issues for libraries and publishers alike connect up to IP authentication. Today, there is substantial interest in eliminating IP authentication, so it is timely to examine the implications if we were soon to see its end.
The Publishing Industry is Mature, but Publishing Companies are Not
While it certainly is the case that scholarly publishing is a mature business, some of the companies operating in this industry have found new avenues for growth by expanding beyond the publication of content into data science. This is an opportunity that is only available to the larger companies with enlightened management.
Bitcoin: A Solution to Publisher Authentication and Usage Accounting
The technology developed to create a crypto-currency may be used to solve two intractable problems in scholarly publishing: authenticating users and counting usage.
Update on a Library Research Project
Preliminary results on a research project on library acquisitions are now in. They suggest some interesting patterns in collection-building; the data from this project will be useful for other researchers. It is hoped that the full roll-out of this project will take place later this year.
The Open Scholarship Initiative: Talking a Good Game, But Can We Deliver?
A look back at the recent Open Scholarship Initiative conference, from several Scholarly Kitchen “Chefs” who attended.
Integrate to Innovate: Using Standards to Push Content Forward
While many of the traditional publishing tasks remain intact, new tasks that are much more technical in nature have changed the skill sets required to be scholarly publishers. As new and developing standards and services such as Funder Identification, ORCID, CHORUS, and more come online, publishers and their vendors must integrate when they would rather innovate. The trick is in realizing where integration allows more innovation.
Citation Networks Yield Competitive Intelligence
Citation networks can provide much more than journal metrics and rankings. Publishers should look to them for competitive intelligence.