The Daily Show: Glass Half Empty
The Daily Show goes after the “glassholes”.
This Just In from the 1990s — We’re Doomed, Doomed, Doomed, Sayeth the Editor of VentureBeat
A Silicon Valley journalist has seen open access and deemed it disruptive. He’s 15+ years and scads of evidence behind the times, as we enter the post-disruption era.
Stick to Your Ribs: Back to School: Rethinking the Textbook
Revisiting Joe Esposito’s 2011 post on the challenges and the strategies for moving textbooks into the digital era.
Well, That About Wraps it up for Clayton Christensen
Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation is critically examined by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker. If he is wrong, why is the idea of disruption such a compelling one?
Author vs. Author: The Authors Guild and the Authors Alliance Set to Duke It Out?
The emergence of the Authors Alliance is causing consternation among some members of the traditional publishing community, most notably the Authors Guild, which has already issued a sharply-worded critique. But what is the Alliance actually going to do? They’re not really saying.
PLOS ONE Output Falls 25 Percent
Publication output for the largest journal in science continues to fall, just not as fast as leading indicators would predict.
Regret Salad with Aspiration Dressing — A Scholarly Publisher Delves Into the New York Times’ Innovation Report
The New York Times’ “Innovation” Report will hit a lot of nerves when it comes to strategy, long-term transformation, investment, digital operations, silos, print legacy, and organizational culture. And it will remind you how barely contained panic looks to others.
University Presses: "Under Fire" or Just Under the Gun (Like the Rest of Us)?
Are university presses really “under fire,” or are they simply experiencing the natural consequences of doing the wrong things at the wrong time in a marketplace that has evolved away from them?
Keeping It Real — Are Our Technology Expectations Out of Whack?
While we fuss over our interfaces and capabilities, we often forget how difficult software is to create and sustain, how easy it is to imagine otherwise, and how scarce engineering and programming resources are across the board.
A Report from Inside Innovation — The Excitement and Uncertainty of the New
In the midst of a couple of major projects, here are some top-of-mind lessons from cultivating and sharing ideas on the long road of innovation.
Bears Always Sound Smarter
Discourse about new ideas in publishing can be broken by the appetite to make exquisitely insightful remarks about things to do not yet exist. To work on truly new things, we have to stop performing the role of the skeptic.
What Is the "News" Associated with Journal Publication?
The news function of journals has many dimensions, a major one consisting of where and when an article is published.
A Modest Proposal for Scaled-up Open Access
A new white paper by K|N Consulting offers an intriguing blueprint for an Open Access journal publishing system at mass scale, one built on a three-way partnership between publishers, libraries, and higher-education institutions. It suggests interesting possibilities and raises equally interesting questions.
Reinventing the Impact Factor for the 21st century
If we were to build a citation reporting system today, what would it look like? In this post, I propose a solution that would do away with a separate Journal Citation Report (JCR) and propose a suite of services built around the Web of Science, directed to the needs of journal editors and publishers.
Rearguard and Vanguard
The problem of piracy is not easily solved with legal or even technical initiatives. To make piracy less significant, publishers need to create a different kind of content service, one that is resistant to piracy because of its dynamic nature.