A Confusion of Journals — What Is PubMed Now?
PubMed is found to contain predatory journals and publishers, likely reflecting a long-term and broader problem, which only adds to the confusion about what exactly PubMed represents at this point.
MECA – A New Manuscript Exchange initiative
A new initiative has been launched to define best practices for simplifying transfer of submitted manuscripts across publishers and systems.
Tracking the Evolution of Reference Resources
A new study from Oxford University Press further documents the decline of reference resources, a category of scholarly material more than ready for an innovative era in its evolution.
The Trance of Dysfunction — Why Trolls Have Come to Dominate Discourse
Trolls dominate for many reasons — economics, technology, our predilection for sordid entertainment. But they’ve chilled online discourse and damaged civil exchanges, even making some publishers reluctant to take full advantage of the potential of the Internet. Are we ready for v2.0 of commenting?
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.
Design Matters: Why Are So Many Cartoon Characters Yellow?
Why do so many animators choose yellow for their characters?
Should We Stop with the Commenting Already?
No matter what we call it, commenting on scholarly publications has a spotty record of success. Despite the mediocre results, journals, databases, and third party sites keep trying to get authors and readers to engage in this way. This post explores different models and the challenges online commenting faces.
The Stars Are Aligning for Preprints
An overview of recent events and the current state of preprints in the scholarly communications landscape.
Ebooks, Innovation, and the Rebel Within
In every publishing organization you need a rebel. Robert Harington talks with Peter Krautzberger, project lead for MathJax and rebel, about his views on Web publishing, ebooks and mathematics.
Doing the Time Warp: The Lag Between Publication and Discovery
Content usage is a commercial priority for publishers — so too should be overcoming temporal stumbling blocks and refining metadata syndication to optimize the researcher experience of engaging with our online content.
The Unstoppable Corporate Force Meets the Immovable Social Network
The companies behind social networks and media are running into conflicts with their users as they try to generate revenue from their services. Recent moves by Google, Facebook and AT&T are all sparking controversy as each encounters opposition to their business models from their customers.