Dismayed by the loss of trust in facts, and seeming preference for half-truths that appears to be driving our political present, Robert Harington decided to catch up on his reading over the weekend, and stumbled across a stimulating article in Publishers Weekly, entitled How to Sell Nearly a Half-Million Copies of a Poetry Book, by Anisse Gross.
Paying a living wage for reviews could provide postdocs with a temporary career alternative. But it won’t come cheaply and it will likely result in an uncompetitive journal with little chance of success.
A few take-aways from STM Week, including London Information International — why publishers have to take security seriously, why OA may need to itself be disrupted, and why we might want to rethink the “content business” positioning we have.
A public service message from the Weather Channel.
Quantitative analysis of researchers’ use of scholarly networks shows that they are more likely to be used for individual interests than for collaborative purposes.
There is sufficient supply of reviewers to meet demand, a new paper suggests. It’s just not evenly distributed.
How much privacy are you willing to relinquish for convenience? How much effort are you willing to expend for security? This month we asked the chefs: Where Is The Balance Between Security, Authentication, Marketing, and Privacy?
A recent UKSG conference explored what researchers need from scholarly communications, and whether the provisions of publishers, libraries and others are keeping up. Once again, the biggest frustration is rooted not in publisher / library services but in institutional structures for recognition.
Information warfare is both tactical and strategic, with much of its success stemming from the weakened economics of the current information economy. Scholarly publishers have experienced this in many ways, from Google Scholar to predatory publishers to pre-print archives — all answers to the calls for “free information” and all revealing tactical and strategic vulnerabilities as accuracy and facts become luxury items in the information war.
PIDapalooza, the first ever festival of persistent identifiers, set out not only to bring together the creators and users of PIDs, but also to make PIDs cool. Did it succeed? Find out in this report on the event from Alice Meadows and Phill Jones
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.
A cautionary tale on how difficult it can be to obtain another researcher’s published data.
Researchers may publish their best work at any point in their careers, a new study reports. This is not the same as success being the result of random forces or just plain “dumb luck.”
Six-plus years later, it’s time to revisit Michael Clarke’s now-classic post about disruption, or rather the lack thereof, in scientific publishing.
We know that women are under-represented at the most senior levels of scholarly publishing, but is there also a male/female pay gap at the top? This analysis of publicly available data from 46 US non-profit organizations provides some answers, as well as showing the need for more work on this important topic.