In a blend of savvy commercial sense and forward-thinking strategy, HarperCollins is launching a book division that won’t pay advances to authors, won’t pay “bricks” stores a premium for upfront retail space, and won’t accept returns. Instead, it will focus […]
Online beats print in so many ways: it’s searchable, has greater storage capacity, and supports multiple media (i.e., audio, video, animation), just to name three. Here’s more whimsical evidence that print is inferior. In this case, online makes a print […]
How quickly they grow up! It seems like only yesterday that GenBank was a two-volume listing of alleles cavorting at our feet. Now, it’s a strapping (300 pickup trucks’ worth) bruiser of genetic information. Congratulations to GenBank on reaching the […]
An experiment in having a book peer-reviewed online has concluded, and the results are detailed in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The book entitled “Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies,” examines the importance of using software design […]
A good article in the Economist outlines some of the important social roles the Internet is playing in China, even though it is tightly controlled (Wikipedia banned, Google filtered, for instance). China will soon boast more Internet users than any […]
The mainstream media may be registering the revolution, but is it too late? A recent New York Times story reveals in all its glory how younger readers parse news through social media. One focus group participant is quoted saying, “If […]
A new book publishing venture called Fractal Press seeks to anthologize blogs and publish the resulting books using print-on-demand technologies. An interview with co-founder Navanit Arakeri can be found on Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 blog. Arakeri will start with personal […]
According to the CrossTech blog at CrossRef, Microsoft has released a beta version of their plug-in for marking up manuscripts with the National Library of Medicine (NLM) DTD. The plug-in is called the Article Authoring Add-in. The goal is to […]
A federal judge’s decision this month (reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education) cleared plagiarism-detection tool Turnitin of charges that it violates student copyrights, even though it stores digital copies of their papers. An appeal will likely be filed. The […]
The March 2008 issue of the online journal First Monday is entitled, “Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0.” It’s worth a look. Some pieces are especially provocative, including “Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation,” “Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance,” […]
The Association of College & Research Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) have created a short video designed to familiarize researchers with some of the issues around author rights. A slide […]
Two weeks ago, Elsevier and MIT announced a deal allowing MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) project free use of a limited amount of images and text from Elsevier journals, all under a Creative Commons license. The limits are up to 3 figures […]
The New Scientist recently reported that a group of physicists and the American Physical Society (APS) are having a disagreement over inclusion of derivative materials on Wikipedia and other, more specialized wikis. Peter Suber has a good analysis of the […]
A fascinating study from Oikos: The Journal of Ecology finds that research output and number of citations (aggregate and per-paper) are inversely correlated with per-capita beer consumption. That is, where beer consumption rises, research productivity falls, as measured by papers […]