Fixing Instead of Breaking, Part One — Open Citations
With so much broken by the Internet, we may be moving into a mode of fixing things. Are open citations part of the solution, or more of the problem?
Roadblocks to Accessibility
Accessible publishing is better for publishers, better for the bottom line, better for readers of all stripes. If we agree that egalitarian dissemination of academic content is the thing to do, including those with physical, learning, or cognitive challenges, then why does end-to-end accessible publishing continue to elude us?
What Will You Do When They Come for Your Proxy Server?
RA21 aims to replace IP address authentication (and proxy servers) with federated identity authentication – but have we thought through the implications?
Book Review: “Technically Wrong,” by Sara Wachter-Boettcher
A new book explores how biases and broken systems get built into technology products and platforms.
A View from the Outside — Trends and Challenges Consultants See in Scholarly Publishing
Input from more than a dozen consultants portrays an industry struggling to adapt to a dramatically different and rapidly changing information economy.
Book Review: “The New Analog” by Damon Krukowski
Is “signal” meaningful in the absence of “noise”? Damon Krukowski asks what important things have been lost in our transition from analog to digital media in his book, “The New Analog”.
Access vs. Accessibility in Scholarship and Science
Ideally, we want science and scholarship to be not only available to the general public, but also comprehensible to them. But the challenges to doing so are real, and may vary both by discipline and by study type.
Guest Post — JATS4R: Optimizing the Reusability of Scholarly Content
Canadian Science Publishing’s Mary Seligy provides a primer on standards, XML and JATS4R, which is driving improved reusability of scholarly content.
Naiveté Scene — Open Source vs. Scale in Scholarly Publishing
Once again, the term “open” requires further thought to probe the pros and cons. With open source, we may be once again doing things that make the big bigger and the small less relevant.
Independence Lost — Taxpayer Funding and Information Access Take a Dark Turn
We once assumed taxpayer-funding meant information availability. The new US government is now actively hiding scientific data, imperiling our understanding of the world.
Platform Diving — Top Journals, UX, and the Lure of Harmonization
A review of top journals in 18 fields show they are on a variety of platforms, suggesting cognitive burden for users which may be driving them to aggregated options with unified user experiences.
Locks, Keys, and Firewalls — Why Internet Security Requires Digital, Analog . . . and Diligent Humans
Internet security seems to be crumbling before our eyes, and our media and leaders are not immune and lack a crucial understanding of how vulnerable a totally digital world can be. The answer may lie with analog technologies.
Life on the Launch Pad — The Ups and Downs of Product Development, and Why It’s Hard to Achieve Orbit
Product development has surged back into the fore, in both incremental and paradigm-shifting ways. Yet, some cultures still struggle with it, and the need for the right teams and approaches — especially marketing and sales — remains high.
Rethinking Authentication, Revamping the Business
IP authentication is the most important mechanism for authorizing access to licensed e-resources resources. Substantial business and policy issues for libraries and publishers alike connect up to IP authentication. Today, there is substantial interest in eliminating IP authentication, so it is timely to examine the implications if we were soon to see its end.
Publishing, Politics and Reason
Robert Harington grapples with the lack of understanding by the publishing elites on all sides of shifting ideologies of an individual’s relationship to information on the web.