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they need, researchers today encounter archipelagos of content bridged by infrastructure that is insufficient and often outdated.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 It is important to dispel some myths about RA21 so we can move on from the outdated world of IP-authentication.
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?
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?
RA21 aims to replace IP address authentication (and proxy servers) with federated identity authentication – but have we thought through the implications?
A new book explores how biases and broken systems get built into technology products and platforms.
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.