What Is the "News" Associated with Journal Publication?
The news function of journals has many dimensions, a major one consisting of where and when an article is published.
The Expert
The intersection of vague business plans and practical implementation is often a frustrating process.
Public Access to Public Books: The Case of the National Trust
The UK’s National Trust owns 140 libraries containing hundreds of thousands of volumes, many of them in the public domain. What would it take to make those books available to the public that owns them?
Bitcoin and Flash Traders — Leveraging Scarcity Within the Internet's Infrastructure
Two ways to leverage scarcity in the computer world are worth examining, because they represent baffling new ways for the rich to get richer.
Learning to Read: Navigating the Ebook Reader Market
This post explores the confusing landscape of ebook readers, presenting a few of the options available along with their pros and cons.
Does Creative Commons Make Sense?
Axiomatically more complicated than copyright, built to provide no legal cover, and possibly put in place by the technocrats in Silicon Valley, does Creative Commons make sense for the creative class?
Publish or Perish: Is Publishing the Career it Once Was?
A sense of gloom hangs over academic publishing these days. As library budgets are cut, and the fear of OA mandates cutting profit margins clouds publishers’ sense of their place in the world, what is it like to be a publishing professional in this era of climate change?
The Measurement of the Thing: Thinking About Metrics, Altmetrics and How to Beat Goodhart's Law
Can machine readable articles, built on author/editor/publisher curated declarative statements and the associated data (or links thereto), be a way of generating metrics that get us nearer to a ‘standard candle’ of scientific research output?
Wellcome Money — In This Example of Open Access Funding, the Matthew Effect Dominates
A surprising set of recipients dominate a list of APC payments released by Wellcome Trust, suggesting that OA is not leading to a reshaping of the industry but perhaps merely driving further consolidation.
What Library Directors Are Thinking: An Ithaka S+R Survey Report
Ithaka S+R has just published the latest in its ongoing series of triennial library director surveys, and its findings are interesting and, in some ways, sobering.
This One Doesn’t Scale — One Big Reason Why Online Advertising Is Comparatively Limited
Online advertising fails to match print advertising in its scalability, slowing the transition to online for major journals and capping the potential for online subscription prices to be offset in a manner similar to print’s legacy business.
Layers Upon Layers — Taking Advantage of the Great Infrastructure Build-Out of the Twenty Aughts
The infrastructure layers that are emerging specifically for scholarly publishers, authors, and readers are yielding new services and even more layers. What’s next? And what’s missing?
Privacy and the University Press
As university presses become more involved with D2C marketing, they are going to confront the need for clearly articulated privacy policies. The time to put those policies in place is now.
Occam's Reader: An Interview
Interlibrary loan is a complex and difficult issue in the realm of ebooks. A new tool called Occam’s Reader hopes to simplify the process for libraries, provide better service to users, and reassure publishers worried about rights management.
The Four Yorkshiremen: What Do Researchers Want?
Scholarly Kitchen chef, Robert Harington asks “what do researchers want?” From those in mathematics to tumor immunology, from gerontology to Melville studies, the answer is often “to do my research in the best way possible.” Using a dose of pythonesque humor, this post chips away at this question, providing an interesting example of how the American Chemical Society is thinking through such issues.