Chefs’ Selections: The Best Books Read During 2016 Part 2
The beginning of the holiday season means it’s time for our annual list of our favorite books read during the year. Today brings Part 2 of the list.
Chefs’ Selections: The Best Books Read During 2016 Part 1
The beginning of the holiday season means it’s time for our annual list of our favorite books read during the year. Part 1 today, Part 2 tomorrow.
How’s That "Abundance" Thing Working Out For You?
The age of information abundance may have fundamental flaws — barriers to entry that create false equivalence; dissemination tools that conflate fake information with responsible sources; self-reinforcing loops of conspiracy and paranoia; and social fragmentation that makes societal disruption more likely. What can be done? Here are a few ideas.
Does Democracy Need Footnotes?
Are scholarly citation practices really the bedrock of engaged democratic governance? Maybe.
All Hallow’s Read
A new tradition to share a favorite scary book on Halloween offers a sweet treat for readers.
Love That Dirty Water — Are We Headed Toward a "Clean Science Act"?
With greater awareness of the foibles and failings of scientific publishing, weaker self-regulation systems, and a trend toward governmental regulation of funding, is external regulation of the scientific journals system now inevitable?
Curation Nation: Thoughts on the Future of Textbooks
Is there a role for a curated, remixing approach to developing next generation textbooks. Robert Harington investigates the role of curated open textbooks in teaching today’s students, looking at some of the available tools, the way in which instructors utilize such tools, and issues around fair use of content.
Book Review: "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari
An excellent book about humankind in general holds important fundamental insights for scholarly publishers, editors, and researchers.
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.
Publishing, Politics and Reason
Robert Harington grapples with the lack of understanding by the publishing elites on all sides of shifting ideologies of an individual’s relationship to information on the web.
Elsevier Acquires SSRN
Today, Elsevier is announcing that it has acquired SSRN, the preprint and publishing community that focuses on social sciences and law. Among other things, the SSRN acquisition is another step in Elsevier’s path towards data and analytics. In a number of ways, Mendeley is the linchpin for this acquisition. More generally, this acquisition plainly indicates Elsevier’s interest in the open access repository space. Finally, universities, their libraries, and other publishers, should have on their minds some of the policy and governance issues around the data that Elsevier is accumulating and the uses to which they may be put.
Accessing Publisher Resources via a Mobile Device: A User’s Journey
How do users access content on mobile devices? While many surveys have been done on mobile usage, documenting the user’s experience via “journey mapping” provides a picture of the challenges that remain in using IP authentication in the institutional setting.
Sensationalism or Legitimate Worries? Examining the Cottage Industry of Journal Criticism and Science Alarmism
We’re in a thicket of stories proclaiming “science is broken” and that stealing articles isn’t stealing because, publishers. This cottage industry of journal bashing and science trashing has reached a crescendo. What drives it? And what more important stories are being missed in the maelstrom?
Postscript on Sci-Hub: The University Press Edition
Not only is Sci-Hub pirating STM articles; it also has built a large collection of unauthorized university press monographs. This undermines the argument that Sci-Hub is an activist site fighting against corporate greed, as the university press community typically operates at a deficit. But university presses have many other challenges, and the threat posed by Sci-Hub is not the largest among them.
The New(ish) Kids on the Block – Touring the Megajournals
A tour of four major “megajournals” and some of their neighbors finds a few common approaches and a few distinguishing features, but the entire category may need to be rethought given the lack of “mega” generally among the set.