Data Detectives: Investigating What is, and What is Not, Measured

Businesses are using more data than ever to inform decision making. While the truly large Big Data may be limited to the likes of Google, Amazon, and Facebook, publishers are nonetheless managing more data than ever before. While the technical challenges may be less daunting with smaller data sets, there remain challenges in interpreting data and in using it to make informed decisions. Perhaps the most daunting challenge is in understanding the limitations of the dataset: What is being measured and, just as importantly, what is not being measured? What inferences and conclusions can be drawn and what is mere conjecture? Where are the bricks and mortar solid and where does the foundation give way beneath our feet?

Inadvertent Innovation

While we usually think of innovators as visionaries with big ideas that challenge the very assumptions of the way we conduct our lives, many innovations seem to happen almost by accident. The challenge is how to make these accidents occur more often and to benefit from them.

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.

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.