Stick To Your Ribs: Ask the Chefs: “Are We a Service Industry Or a Product Industry?”
Revisiting a 2012 post to ask, do journal authors really give their articles away for free to publishers?
Open Access Publication Gains Acceptance With Authors, Licenses Still Problematic
A recent survey of authors by Taylor and Francis reveals growing acceptance of open access publishing; however, Creative Commons licensing may still pose a problem.
What Societies Really Think About Open Access
What do societies really think about Open Access? A recent survey, though small, provides some initial answers…
Hit the Road — How a Forgettable Paper and a Misguided Publisher Created an Unnecessary Controversy
The censorship scandal at Taylor & Francis has wrapped up, and the lessons are as obvious as you think.
This Just In from the 1990s — We’re Doomed, Doomed, Doomed, Sayeth the Editor of VentureBeat
A Silicon Valley journalist has seen open access and deemed it disruptive. He’s 15+ years and scads of evidence behind the times, as we enter the post-disruption era.
Life in a Bubble — The Limitations of Public Access, the Challenges of Public Engagement
Presumptions about the benefits of access fail to take into account the power and difficulty of true engagement with diverse publics.
Author vs. Author: The Authors Guild and the Authors Alliance Set to Duke It Out?
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.
PLOS ONE Output Falls 25 Percent
Publication output for the largest journal in science continues to fall, just not as fast as leading indicators would predict.
Open Access: Fundamentals to Fundamentalists
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.
Identity Theft of the Scholarly Kind
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.
What Researchers Value from Publishers, Canadian Survey
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.
How Do We Address the Continuing Problem of Inadequate and Deceptive Publishing Practices?
Technological trends have enabled experiments in publishing. But now that we’ve seen plenty of experiments, is it time to bring them under control?
Bears Always Sound Smarter
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 Modest Proposal for Scaled-up Open Access
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 Evolving Ecosystem for Journals Publishing
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.