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.
Andrea Powell – an interview with CABI’s Chief Information Officer
Robert Harington interviews Andrea Powell, Chief Information Officer at CABI, revealing an inspiring advocate and leader across publishing and technology sectors.
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.
Guest Post, Fred Dylla: Content Sharing Made Simple: A Collaborative Approach
Editor’s Note: Fred Dylla is the Executive Director Emeritus of the American Institute of Physics. With more than 30 years experience as a practicing scientist, Dylla has also taken a leading role as an advocate for the sciences. An important […]
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.
Image Manipulation: Cleaning Up the Scholarly Record
After hundreds of manipulated images were detected across 40 scientific journals, the real work will be to correct the scientific record.
Ask The Chefs: What Should We Discuss During The SSP Mentoring Plenary?
Help us identify discussion topics and questions for the Society of Scholarly Publishing 2016 Annual Meeting. What did you only wish you knew when you were just starting out in scholarly publishing?
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.
Three Things Scholarly Publishers Should Know About Researchers
We’ve looked recently at things publishers want researchers to understand better. Are there things researchers in turn want publishers to understand better? Charlie Rapple opens a discussion.
Data Citation Standards: Progress, But Slow Progress
A study shows that adherence to best practices for data citation is improving, but still has a long way to go.
What I Learned on the Way to the Kitchen
Basic literacy in scholarly communications is essential for scholars across disciplines and fields. What I learned moving from full-time academic work to a role in scholarly publishing.
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.
Will the Monograph Experience a Transition to E-Only? Latest Findings.
Although journals, other serials, and reference have made a large scale transition away from print, we must not assume that the same path will inevitably be pursued for other components of collections. A combination of business models, reading practices, and other user needs will play the biggest role in determining the prospects for the printed monograph. Today, it seems that a dual-format environment may remain before us for some time, and there will be advantages for the libraries, publishers, and intermediaries that can develop models for monographs that work best in such an environment.
How Readers Discover Content in Scholarly Publications
A new survey looks at the ways readers discover scholarly publications. Due to methodological limitations, scholarly information professionals should practice caution in interpreting the findings and considering potential business responses. Ultimately, it is impressive that the researchers have taken on such a large-scale study, which adds some additional context to our understanding of discovery, especially in its diversity.