We Step Aside: American Histories of Racism and Activism
This week The Scholarly Kitchen is spotlighting research and researchers writing about systemic racism. Today we feature historians writing about American histories of racism.
Publishers Announce a Major New Service to Plug Leakage
Today, a group of leading publishers is announcing a major new service to plug leakage, improve discovery and access, fight piracy, compete with ResearchGate, and position their platform for the OA ecosystem. This new service shows that publishers are finally beginning to address digital strategy in an environment that has steadily eroded their ability to monetize the value they create. Does it go far enough to reset the competitive environment?
Thinking about the Art and Science of Image Description: An Interview with textBOX Founders
If a picture is worth a thousand words, the folks at textBOX can help publishers present that descriptive text (“alt-text”) to the online world, meeting key accessibility and discoverability demands.
Exclusive Deals in Scholarly Discovery: How they Hurt Users and Pose Threats to Open Scholarship
Exclusive indexing deals in scholarly discovery hurt researchers and undermine the drive toward comprehensive library search.
Guest Post: Do Journal Article Recommendation Features Change Reader Behavior?
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.
Discovery Should Be Delivery: User-Centric Principles for Discovery as a Service
Library discovery can only succeed in reaching a high market share if it is intensely user-centered. Articulating user-centric principles for discovery has enabled the University Library to Illinois to evolve a discovery environment that meets the needs of its community of users.
Failure to Deliver: Reaching Users in an Increasingly Mobile World
Judy Luther and Todd Carpenter look at the technological challenges of providing access to content in an increasingly dispersed and mobile world.
How’s That "Abundance" Thing Working Out For You?
The age of information abundance may have fundamental flaws — barriers to entry that create false equivalence; dissemination tools that conflate fake information with responsible sources; self-reinforcing loops of conspiracy and paranoia; and social fragmentation that makes societal disruption more likely. What can be done? Here are a few ideas.
Guest Post: Research4Life’s Richard Gedye — How Publishers are Quietly (Too Quietly?) Supporting UNESCO’s Universal Access To Information Day
Research4Life’s Richard Gedye discusses publisher contributions to UNESCO’s International Day for Universal Access to Information.
Accessing Publisher Resources via a Mobile Device: A User’s Journey
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.
How Readers Discover Content in Scholarly Publications
A new survey looks at the ways readers discover scholarly publications. Due to methodological limitations, scholarly information professionals should practice caution in interpreting the findings and considering potential business responses. Ultimately, it is impressive that the researchers have taken on such a large-scale study, which adds some additional context to our understanding of discovery, especially in its diversity.
Dismantling the Stumbling Blocks that Impede Researcher Access to E-Resources
The user experience of working with e-journals and ebooks in an academic setting has failed to keep up with changing practices and preferences for how researchers now expect to access the scholarly literature.I called attention to some of these limitations in a presentation at the STM Association annual conference in October.The video of my talk is now available: I hope you enjoy the presentation
Discovery and Access in Light of the Ebola Outbreak
Several researchers recently “stumbled across” an article indicating the reasonable likelihood that Liberia would be faced with cases of Ebola. Public health officials had not acted on this known likelihood. The question is why.
PubMed Central Reduces Publisher Traffic, Study Shows
PubMed Central reduces article downloads from 14 biomedical society websites when articles are made freely available after embargo.