The Scholarly Kitchen
Technology
Book Review — The Traps of Big Data Revealed in “Weapons of Math Destruction” by Cathy O’Neil
The new book, “Weapons of Math Destruction,” calls out many worrying trends in the application of big data, with particularly salient entries on higher education rankings, for-profit universities, the justice system, insurance, and employment. Continue reading
The Comic Book Font, and How Digital Technologies are Changing Lettering
A look at the evolution of comic book fonts, once driven by the physical nature of the books and now moving into new digital possibilities. Continue reading
A Quick Tour Around the World of Scholarly Journal Publishing
A presentation to the 2016 ISMTE US Conference. Something of a “state of our industry” overview, or perhaps, everything I needed to know I learned from the other bloggers at The Scholarly Kitchen. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
Open Ebooks Coming to Project MUSE: An Interview with Wendy Queen
This summer, Project MUSE announced that it is developing its ability to host and distribute open access (OA) ebooks. Project MUSE’s director Wendy Queen spoke with me recently about this program and some of the broader strategic issues we should be contemplating. Continue reading
Locks, Keys, and Firewalls — Why Internet Security Requires Digital, Analog . . . and Diligent Humans
Internet security seems to be crumbling before our eyes, and our media and leaders are not immune and lack a crucial understanding of how vulnerable a totally digital world can be. The answer may lie with analog technologies. Continue reading
Coming Soon: Battles Over Academic Privacy — But Is This Fight Already Over?
How much is the privacy of academics worth? Judging by the behavior of most people, seemingly very little. Continue reading
Nuts and Bolts: The Super Long List of Things to Do When Starting a New Journal
Launching a new journal is a lot of work. This post looks at the basic “to do” list of logistical details that need to be done to successfully launch a new journal. Continue reading
Life on the Launch Pad — The Ups and Downs of Product Development, and Why It’s Hard to Achieve Orbit
Product development has surged back into the fore, in both incremental and paradigm-shifting ways. Yet, some cultures still struggle with it, and the need for the right teams and approaches — especially marketing and sales — remains high. Continue reading
The Discrete Charm of Geometry – A Review
Amidst the politics of open access, the financial pressure on research libraries, and the sense that ubiquity trumps quality, it is worth remembering that nothing can squash the fervor of academic endeavor. Video is increasingly deployed in the publishing of academic research. Robert Harington explores the importance of using different types of media to provide insight into cultural and historical aspects of a field through a review of a new movie by Ekaterina Eremenko – The Discrete Charm of Geometry. Continue reading
Can You Coko? An Interview with Kristen Ratan of the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation
If you haven’t already heard of the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation (CKF or Coko for short), chances are you soon will. Find out more in this interview with co-founder Kristen Ratan. Continue reading
What Is SocArXiv?
A new “papers service” for social science content was recently launched and is capitalizing on concerns over the sale of a long time preprint server by a commercial publisher. While the timing might be right, the set up looks a little hasty. Continue reading
Optical Illusions — Shifting to Citation Distributions Only Makes It Easier to Fool the Eye
A proposal to substitute graphs of citation distributions for impact factors introduces many problems the authors don’t seem to have fully grasped, including unintentionally bolstering the importance of the very metric they seek to diminish. Continue reading
Have You Looked At This? Yewno
Yewno was formally launched at ALA in Orlando. Is this new technological approach going to re-shape the way undergraduates think about discovery of relevant content? Continue reading
Guest Post, Darrell Gunter: Accessibility Is The New Innovation
Darrell Gunter discusses the great opportunities available in making all forms of content accessible to everyone. Continue reading
Detecting (and Stopping) Robot Pirates
Designed to act like humans, pirate robots avoid detection by keeping download requests low, cycling through journals, and jumping from publisher to publisher. Continue reading
Textbooks in Academic Libraries: The Publisher’s Case
This post presents a case for why publishers would want to participate in a program to sell textbooks to academic libraries. The plan would include a means for publishers to retain their profitability, albeit on a lower sales volume, by taking advantage of digital technology and by “repairing” some broken elements in the current marketplace, e.g., the market for used and pirated books. Continue reading
Copyright, Expectations, and Economics — Can Taylor Swift Help Us Find Our Backbone?
Expectations of free content are entrenched, but artists, authors, and publishers are all hurting because of it. The basic problem? It’s leading to a lack of trust in the future. Continue reading
Rethinking Authentication, Revamping the Business
IP authentication is the most important mechanism for authorizing access to licensed e-resources resources. Substantial business and policy issues for libraries and publishers alike connect up to IP authentication. Today, there is substantial interest in eliminating IP authentication, so it is timely to examine the implications if we were soon to see its end. Continue reading
Two-step Authentication: Finally Coming to a University Near You
Many of the popular tools that we use everyday require two-step authentication. It seems odd that universities, who store data much more valuable than cat videos, recipes, and selfies, are slow to require it. That may change shortly.
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Authors
The mission of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) is "[t]o advance scholarly publishing and communication, and the professional development of its members through education, collaboration, and networking." SSP established The Scholarly Kitchen blog in February 2008 to keep SSP members and interested parties aware of new developments in publishing.
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The Scholarly Kitchen is a moderated and independent blog. Opinions on The Scholarly Kitchen are those of the authors. They are not necessarily those held by the Society for Scholarly Publishing nor by their respective employers.
