There is much discussion now about creating new online bookstores, especially for academic publishers. Some of these discussions, however, are not aligned with overarching trends on the Internet and risk creating something that appears to be out of date the moment it is launched.
What’s wrong with peer review and article submission processes? What can publishers, authors, and reviewers do to improve the status quo?
As we consider the future of scholarly publishing generally and of open access in particular, we need to keep in mind the deep differences between the humanities and the applied sciences when it comes to both the production and the consumption of scholarship–and the implications of those differences for new dissemination models.
April sees the first Advancing Research Communication & Scholarship conference, described by the organizers as providing a “broad and collaborative forum for addressing and affecting scholarly and scientific communication. Find out more about this new meeting in our interview with two ARCS 2015 Board members, Robin Champieux and Jill Emery
The use of Mechanical Turk in research may generate misleading data and false information. Do we need to guard against such mechanical methodologies?
While more scientific information than ever is available, science itself is struggling for funding, for cultural footholds, and for priority in society. What has gone wrong?
The Academic Publishing in Europe (APE) meeting in Europe is 10 years old, but feels as fresh and frisky as some of the meetings in the US used to. This report touches on some of the most interesting threads of two days’ worth of interesting presentations and conversations.
The University of California Press has announced two new open access publishing initiatives, one a monographs program and the other an OA mega journal. Here UCP director Alison Mudditt answers some questions posed by the Kitchen about these new initiatives.
Despite recent criticisms, peer review remains central to scholarly communication – but identifying and maintaining a steady stream of trained and knowledgeable peer reviewers is increasingly challenging. With researchers under more pressure than ever to publish or perish, some journal editors would like to see more support and recognition for peer review from their institutions and funders.
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.
A recent study finds that academic press offices exaggerate claims in their press releases about published research. Worse, the vast majority of these find their way into subsequent reporting.
Publishers often slap labels on activities that are complex, expensive, and high-value. Worse, we often accept people calling these activities “value-add” when they are core functions of how scientific information shared.
Simple things are often more complex than we initially think, and the push for faster publication may be an expensive and risky trend to follow too much further.
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.
The idea of “reanalysis” needs to be rethought, if recent examples are any indication of what this trend could do to science.