The emergence of the Authors Alliance is causing consternation among some members of the traditional publishing community, most notably the Authors Guild, which has already issued a sharply-worded critique. But what is the Alliance actually going to do? They’re not really saying.
Publication output for the largest journal in science continues to fall, just not as fast as leading indicators would predict.
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.
Building a reputation can take decades for a society, publisher or journal. Unfortunately, the influential “seals of approval” in the industry are easy to spoof leaving some authors confused and deceived.
Peer review, journal reputation, and fast publication were selected by Canadian researchers as the top three factors in deciding where to submit their manuscripts, trumping open access, article-level metrics, and mobile access, a recent study reports.
Technological trends have enabled experiments in publishing. But now that we’ve seen plenty of experiments, is it time to bring them under control?
Discourse about new ideas in publishing can be broken by the appetite to make exquisitely insightful remarks about things to do not yet exist. To work on truly new things, we have to stop performing the role of the skeptic.
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 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.
It’s unclear who in the academic world has any incentive to pay for Gold OA publishing, especially as embargoes satisfy nearly everyone and cost next to nothing.
Lost in the discussions of what open access, open data and public access should look like are the concerns of researchers who are not yet on board with what is being proposed.
A sense of gloom hangs over academic publishing these days. As library budgets are cut, and the fear of OA mandates cutting profit margins clouds publishers’ sense of their place in the world, what is it like to be a publishing professional in this era of climate change?
Even with the protections of traditional copyright, an author may lose control of his original work and see it misappropriated and used for hateful ends. So is it any wonder that many authors have concerns about being required to publish under CC-BY?
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.
A surprising set of recipients dominate a list of APC payments released by Wellcome Trust, suggesting that OA is not leading to a reshaping of the industry but perhaps merely driving further consolidation.