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.
Are University Presses Better off Now than They Were Four Years Ago?
The university press world is operating under circumstances that are somewhat tighter than they were even a few years ago. While most presses now publish ebooks, ebooks in themselves do not provide a strategic path to growth.
Hipster Antitrust and Structural Dominance — What Is a Monopoly Now?
Calling something a “monopoly” has been misleading in many cases, but the new economy may require a complete rethinking of the anti-competitiveness created by intermediaries at scale.
Will Humanities and Social Sciences Publishing Consolidate?
Much of the scholarly publishing sector has already experienced a flight to scale. Today, Roger Schonfeld asks: Is a major consolidation among humanities and social sciences publishers coming next?
Web-scale Library Search: Where Are We Today?
Eleven years after the Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) launched, I wonder: How are ODI conformance statements helping to drive transparency and cross-sector improvements to web-scale library discovery services?
Data Visualization and Scale
A clever visualization that makes it easier to understand statistics about human populations be reducing their scale.
Why Elsevier is a Library’s Best Friend
Elsevier is often thought to the be enemy of libraries, but Elsevier’s practices have in fact improved libraries’ situation, including lowering the prices for scientific article.
Guest Post — One Publisher to Rule Them All? Consolidation Trends in the Scholarly Communications and Research Sectors
Jon Treadway and Sarah Greaves look at the consolidation of the scholarly communications market and where it is leading.
Dynamic Visualization of Biomedical Journals 2003-2012
An animated bubble plot of nearly four-thousand biomedical journals over ten years reveals success, decline and the shifting nature of science publishing.
Macmillan + Springer: Some Lessons to Learn, Some Twists to Watch
The merger of Macmillan and Springer holds many lessons and some interesting twists. More than anything, it indicates a future in which scale continues to confer advantages.
A Taxonomy of University Presses Today
University presses bring a diversity not only of costs, scale, and business models, but also of organizational capacity, incentives, and objectives. As efforts are mounted to transition monograph publishing to open access, it is vital that we recognize the richness and complexity of this community.
Tipping the Scales: Is Impact Factor Suppression Biased Against Small Fields?
The suppression of three economic history journals reveals more about Clarivate’s methods than citation manipulation.
Revisiting — Navigating the Big Deal: A Guide for Societies
In the wak of Plan S, many independent and society publishers are investigating partnerships with larger publishing houses. It’s important to understand what it means to join a publisher’s Big Deal program, and so here we revisit Michael Clarke’s post that explains the changing nature of the Big Deal and what it can mean for these partnerships.
Kitchen Essentials: An Interview with Sami Benchekroun of Morressier
In today’s Kitchen Essentials interview, Roger Schonfeld speaks with Sami Benchekroun, CEO of Morressier, which provides publishers with workflows that ensure research integrity.
Smarter Metadata — Aiding Discovery in Next Generation E-book and E-journal Gateways
For scholars to excel in the information age, technology needs to learn to learn. Perhaps highly specialized humans can help.