Incremental Improvements Start With A/B Testing
Why do publishers and platform providers spend so little time seeking incremental improvements?
The Internet's Permanent Memory: Why Empathy is More Important Than Ever
Victoria Belmont talks about what happens when something you do online is taken out of context and becomes part of the internet’s permanent memory.
Improving Privacy by Rethinking Architecture
Today, we grapple with privacy issues as consumers, as citizens, and as voters. As an industry, we should be thinking about how to draw not only on policy but also on technical architecture to balance privacy and innovation. When the stars align, an entirely different architecture for the control of user data is possible. What would such a shift mean for scholarly publishing and academic libraries?
Greetings from the Age of Abundance
A farewell to 2015, and some thoughts on why our culture has, in an age of abundance, slowed down so much.
The Knowledge Supply Chain in the Internet Age: Who Decides What Information Is Trustworthy?
Alison Mudditt presents a guest post from Julia Kostova and Patrick Alexander that asks questions about how information is vetted in the digital age, and what role scholarly publishers will continue to play.
Under the Microscope
A look at the winners in this year’s Nikon Small World imaging competition.
The Dissertation Mess: Balancing Rights and Responsibilities
The broad online availability of theses and dissertations creates difficult tensions between the individual rights of authors, the rights of educational institutions, and the responsibilities that both have to global scholarship and the collective good. How can we resolve those tensions?
CHORUS Gets a Boost from Federal Agencies – But Will New Approaches Make It Harder to Implement?
As more funders look to adopt CHORUS for providing public access to works derived from federal funds, a review of the publisher requirements for participating in CHORUS seems timely. This post explores the current state of CHORUS agency adoption and some important new requirements.
Virtual Reality and the Scholarly Publisher
This time, Virtual Reality is not a gimmick. This post summarises my investigations and thoughts on the possibilities for VR in the context of scholarly publishing. Plus there’s a quick primer to get you started.
Dismantling the Stumbling Blocks that Impede Researcher Access to E-Resources
The user experience of working with e-journals and ebooks in an academic setting has failed to keep up with changing practices and preferences for how researchers now expect to access the scholarly literature.I called attention to some of these limitations in a presentation at the STM Association annual conference in October.The video of my talk is now available: I hope you enjoy the presentation
People Make the Difference: Steering a Start-up to Success
A panel at the Charleston conference featured three CEOs of start-ups, who shared their experiences in creating and running a completely new organization. All of these companies are computationally sophisticated, so advanced technologically that it is hard to image established companies taking on their challenges. Another common theme is the importance of hiring and retaining the very best people, a matter in which start-up CEOs tend to be obsessive.
University Presses in Decline…Not so Fast
Alison Mudditt asks a group of experts: what are the unique contributions that university presses make to scholarship and scholarly communication?
Celebrating Five Years of Altmetrics
Charlie Rapple reports on the 2:AM conference, which celebrated five years of altmetrics and considered what we should aspire to achieve in the next five years
Guest Post: HighWire’s John Sack on Online Indexing of Scholarly Publications: Part 2, What Happens When Finding Everything is So Easy?
HighWire’s John Sack looks at the changes that search engine indexing has driven for discovery of research publications. Part 2 of a two part series covering Anurag Acharya’s recent ALPSP keynote address.
Transitioning to a More Unified Platform
Combining most if not all of a publisher’s scholarly content on a single publisher platform has not always been the norm. Oxford University Press’s transition to a new platform represents not just a one-to-one platform shift but in fact a consolidation from more to fewer platforms. This is a trend worth understanding and watching.