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.
Input from more than a dozen consultants portrays an industry struggling to adapt to a dramatically different and rapidly changing information economy.
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”.
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.
Canadian Science Publishing’s Mary Seligy provides a primer on standards, XML and JATS4R, which is driving improved reusability of scholarly content.
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.
We once assumed taxpayer-funding meant information availability. The new US government is now actively hiding scientific data, imperiling our understanding of the world.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Today, Elsevier is announcing that it has acquired SSRN, the preprint and publishing community that focuses on social sciences and law. Among other things, the SSRN acquisition is another step in Elsevier’s path towards data and analytics. In a number of ways, Mendeley is the linchpin for this acquisition. More generally, this acquisition plainly indicates Elsevier’s interest in the open access repository space. Finally, universities, their libraries, and other publishers, should have on their minds some of the policy and governance issues around the data that Elsevier is accumulating and the uses to which they may be put.
How do users access content on mobile devices? While many surveys have been done on mobile usage, documenting the user’s experience via “journey mapping” provides a picture of the challenges that remain in using IP authentication in the institutional setting.
We’ve looked recently at things publishers want researchers to understand better. Are there things researchers in turn want publishers to understand better? Charlie Rapple opens a discussion.
A tour of four major “megajournals” and some of their neighbors finds a few common approaches and a few distinguishing features, but the entire category may need to be rethought given the lack of “mega” generally among the set.