The Invisible World of Schlieren Photography
A primer on an imaging technique that lets us visualize the invisible forces that surround us.
Ask The Chefs: If You Were A VC Investing In Scholarly Communications, Where Would You Be Placing Your Bets?
How do you know which technologies, tools, or best practices to incorporate into your organization? What if you had money to invest? Where would you place your bets? This month, we asked the Chefs that question. Come see what they said.
Guest Post: Toll-Free Links Should Be a Win for Everybody
Today’s Guest Post explores toll-free linking as a way for publishers to enable authors to share works published in subscription journals. Guest blogger Todd Reitzel has worked in publishing at several STM and social science associations, most recently the Association for Psychological Science.
The Trance of Dysfunction — Why Trolls Have Come to Dominate Discourse
Trolls dominate for many reasons — economics, technology, our predilection for sordid entertainment. But they’ve chilled online discourse and damaged civil exchanges, even making some publishers reluctant to take full advantage of the potential of the Internet. Are we ready for v2.0 of commenting?
Platform Diving — Top Journals, UX, and the Lure of Harmonization
A review of top journals in 18 fields show they are on a variety of platforms, suggesting cognitive burden for users which may be driving them to aggregated options with unified user experiences.
Failure to Deliver: Reaching Users in an Increasingly Mobile World
Judy Luther and Todd Carpenter look at the technological challenges of providing access to content in an increasingly dispersed and mobile world.
Ask The Chefs: What Did You Learn At This Year’s SSP Annual Meeting?
This year’s SSP Annual Meeting was a record-breaker. Come see what the Chefs learned at the meeting and tell us what you learned, if you were there in person or virtually!
Don’t Feed the Trolls: Jonathan Coulton on the Internet’s Growing Pains
Musician Jonathan Coulton expresses his disillusionment with what the internet has become.
Detours and Diversions — Do Open Access Publishers Face New Barriers?
Open access (OA) publishing seeks to eliminate paywalls for users. It has largely succeeded, but new diversions and distractions built into the commercial Internet may create new barriers that will be harder to deal with.
Reproducible Research, Just Not Reproducible By You
What happens when an experiment is correct, but it’s really hard to replicate? Are there research results that are accurate but not reproducible?
‘The Contingency of a Pinball Machine” – The STM Future Lab Looks Forward to Technology Trends in 2021
The STM Association Future Labs looks at technology trends.
Updating Asimov — How Do We Regain Control In the Digital Age?
Algorithms behave in ways even their creators can’t understand, yet they dominate how we share and see information. Do we need a “Three Laws for Algorithms”?
The Information Landscape — How Do We Tackle the Problems Caused by Silicon Valley?
Science’s historical progress can’t be assumed. It has to be reclaimed, re-established. That’s more difficult in a fragmented information space geared for extremism.
Succession Planning
Robert Harington attempts to help you think through how to develop a strategy for succession planning, recognizing that in today’s world, people just don’t stay at their jobs as long as they used to.
Ask The Chefs: What Is The Most Important Data For A Publisher To Capture?
Data makes content discoverable, aids in decision-making, enriches product development, etc., but what data are most critical to success?