We are likely to see increased mergers and acquisitions activity in the publishing world this year, and scholarly publishing is not exempt from this. There are many reasons for this, including such fundamental factors as low interest rates, but one reason is the growth of open access mandates from funding agencies, which is disrupting the way many organizations do business.
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.
When thinking about open access to content, is it appropriate to equate disabling downloads with lack of support for the visually impaired?
Flickr users were enraged when the company tried to reuse their CC BY licensed photographs by selling prints. This once again points out the confusion that content creators have regarding copyright and what the various CC licenses really mean.
A new report, commissioned by London Higher and SPARC Europe, tries to quantify the costs undertaken by UK higher education and public sector research institutions in complying with open access mandates. The resulting numbers are quite interesting.
Are we all talking about the same thing when we say “open access” — and do we all mean the same thing when we talk about an “open access future”? Short answers: “yes (kind of)” and “no way.”
It is often argued that open access will reduce the overall cost of scholarly communications, but this article proposes that OA will be additive to the size of the current market.
With increased pressure from funding bodies and others for researchers to make their data open, as well as their research articles, it’s important to understand who is already sharing what data, how, why – and why not…
A report from Simba Information tallies the total value of the open access marketplace, putting OA at 2.3% of the total market for STM journals. It documents as well, without comment, that more and more OA activity is the business of for-profit companies.
Since the late 1990s there have been two drivers of growth in STM and scholarly publishing: site licensing and global expansion. As successful as these activities have been, however, we appear to be nearing, if not a peak, at least a plateau. Institutional library budgets have not kept pace with the growth in global research output. At the same time, institutional market penetration is nearing saturation for many publishers.
So the question is, where is the growth going to come from?
The recent “right to be forgotten” case raises a corollary issue for scholarly publishers — are you managing your archives so that users have been given the “right to ignore”?
A look back at some of Rick Anderson’s insightful pieces on the economic realities of journal prices and library budgets.
This year’s beach reading will be spent with books by public intellectuals. Unfortunately, writing for the general public is not valued within the academy, to the detriment of public education.
An interview with the President of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, on the unintended and potentially damaging consequences of public and open access mandates and embargoes.