Following our conversation about Neurodiversity in December, Publishing Enabled return with a discussion about how to make academic conferences more accessible to people with disabilities.
Today, a group of leading publishers is announcing a major new service to plug leakage, improve discovery and access, fight piracy, compete with ResearchGate, and position their platform for the OA ecosystem. This new service shows that publishers are finally beginning to address digital strategy in an environment that has steadily eroded their ability to monetize the value they create. Does it go far enough to reset the competitive environment?
Leakage has strengthened libraries’ negotiating position with respect to content providers. The emerging syndication model syndication offers libraries the opportunity to provide dramatically improve the research experience for their users — with a number of risks as well, including the prospect of substantially reducing their leverage at the negotiating table.
At this years annual STM Week in London, there was a strong focus on collaboration and shared infrastructure. I bunked off one of the days to check out the All Things Coko meeting. Is this the start of a new way to look at scholarly publishing technology?
Calling something a “monopoly” has been misleading in many cases, but the new economy may require a complete rethinking of the anti-competitiveness created by intermediaries at scale.
Despite the enormous changes that digital communication has brought to our lives, the form of the research article remains much the same as it was centuries ago. Sarah Andrus looks at why it hasn’t changed and where it is likely to go in the future.
Instead of the rich and seamless digital library for scholarship that they need, researchers today encounter archipelagos of content bridged by infrastructure that is insufficient and often outdated. Researchers need a supercontinent. Will it be Elsevier, Digital Science, Clarivate, ResearchGate, or someone else? And what does this mean for other publishers?
Researchers say journal article recommendations are useful. Do these publisher platform features influence user behavior? How might they increase discovery and serendipity in the researcher’s workflow? A series of studies provide new evidence of increased reader engagement.
We continue to battle the tidal wave of data with a bucket brigade of individual privacy settings. Maybe it’s time to pause and consider a state-level solution, ala Estonia.
RA21 aims to promote a modern, standards-based access management system that preserves patron privacy & control. It is important to dispel some myths about RA21 so we can move on from the outdated world of IP-authentication.