Altmetrics Boosted by EBSCO's Acquisition of Plum Analytics
EBSCO has recently acquired altmetrics startup Plum Analytics. What will this mean for both companies and altmetrics in general?
Is Google Glass Part of the Laboratory of the Future?
A new concept video puts Google Glass at the heart of a research laboratory. But is there really anything here that couldn’t be done just as easily with existing devices?
The Problem With Facebook
A look at how Facebook increasingly filters the content you see, and how its business model is at odds with the needs of its users.
Who Can Rival Amazon?
Amazon is now the most important participant in the business of scholarly books, but it faces few threats. This post hypothesizes about where challenges to Amazon could come from.
New US Public Access Legislation Included in Government Funding Bill
The US government’s new appropriations bill contains a public access mandate for research articles funded by some agencies.
The Andraka Saga Continues — Vengeance via Wikipedia, and a More Complete View of the Claims
The Jack Andraka story develops further. SSP pages on Wikipedia are taken down by a disgruntled commentator. And Andraka’s draft paper gets a preliminary review, and both the reviewers and Andraka admit it’s less game-changing than the media has led us to believe.
PubMed Central Revealed — Reviewing and Interpreting the Findings of a Surprising 2013
As requested, here is a summary of all the things found so far through the FOIA requests regarding PubMed Central — from eLife to BMC to JMLA to conflicts of interest to coverups. It’s quite a fetch.
The Future (?) of the Scholarly (?) Monograph (?)
As the scholarly communication environment changes, so does the monograph–and the nature of scholarship itself. A few years from now, what will these terms even mean?
Whose Dissertation Is It, Anyway?
Another association of historians has recommended that students be allowed to impose limited embargoes on their dissertations. And so the question arises again: whose work is the dissertation, and who should control it?
What is Kudos? An Interview with David Sommer, Co-Founder
If there was a word of the year competition for Scholarly Publishing, #Altmetrics would be a favorite to win. David Sommer, co-founder and Director of Kudos discusses how this new service could offer usable measurements of the array of article promotion and influencing activities undertaken by scholars.
Print's Retreat — Are the New Metrics of Online Actually Devaluing Publications?
Our measurements of online advertising and online usage seem concrete and definitive, but they may obscure a larger truth about actual engagement and usage, leading to that subtle distinction between precision and accuracy.
Scale Rewards, Scale Punishes — Is the Future of Scholarly Publishing Already Determined?
The Internet rewards scale and creates clear competitive disadvantages for niche businesses. Now that a long-term economic downturn has made for starker realities, the effects of this basic set of facts seem inevitable.
The End of an Era for Academia.edu and Other Academic Networks?
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Elsevier has issued a sweeping series of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take down notices regarding Elsevier-published content to Academia.edu, a file-sharing network for researchers and other academics.
This has prompted a storm in the Twittersphere, a response from Elsevier, a number of commentaries on blogs and list-serves, and a truly bizarre article from CNET. Academia.edu for its part is reportedly encouraging authors of affected papers to sign this Elsevier boycott petition despite the fact that their own terms of use prohibit the posting of content that infringes on the copyright or license of publishers such as Elsevier.
Is this a footnote or the end of a chapter in the annals of digital science publishing?
The Evolution of Digital Publishing and its Formats
A video detailing the evolution of digital publishing, and the enduring popularity of the PDF.
Tip of the Iceberg — How the Illusion of Products Can Mislead Customers About the Realities of Business
As consumers, we are often seduced by the apparent simplicity of the products we use. This can lead us to believe that products are as easy to make as they are to consume — and that is a mistake.