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.
In Part Two, Richard Fisher looks at the past, the present and the future of monograph publishing in the humanities and social sciences.
The new book, “Weapons of Math Destruction,” calls out many worrying trends in the application of big data, with particularly salient entries on higher education rankings, for-profit universities, the justice system, insurance, and employment.
Librarian Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe offers thoughts on where the ongoing clash between scholarly publishers and ResearchGate may end up.
We all know the journals market has rapidly consolidated over recent years. But where’s the data? I set out to find some numbers to put behind the common sense.
Eighteen years ago, Mosaic ushered in the potential for a sea-change in publishing based on technological prowess and scale. Today, the “open” label covers a set of disparate incentives under a single blanket, one that funders, government, and technology companies are all under, each for its own reason.
The question addressed here is not whether we in the academy should “take back publishing” from the commercial scholarly publishers, but rather what the options for doing so might be, and whether any of those options seems feasible at the moment.
Strategy can mean many things to many people. Why is strategy important? How do you go about developing strategy? Chef Robert Harington discusses how, in his view, societies should approach strategic development in context of building a sustainable publishing future.
Online advertising fails to match print advertising in its scalability, slowing the transition to online for major journals and capping the potential for online subscription prices to be offset in a manner similar to print’s legacy business.
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.
2015 has already started with a bang and we think there’s more to come, as you’ll see from the Chef’s responses to the question: What do you think will have the biggest impact on scholarly publishing in 2015?
PeerJ’s first Impact Factor is not expected to surpass 2.000. Without the scale of PLOS ONE, PeerJ may need to seek a larger, diversified buyer. What the journal has to offer other publishers is less clear.
The benefits of personalizing discovery are already playing themselves out in the consumer space, suggesting tremendous opportunities for using data to personalize the research process. Given the scale of data needed for effective personalization, the implications of changing discovery processes will cascade through the scholarly ecosystem.
Revisiting Rick Anderson’s 2013 post on what the options for the academy to take control of scholarly publishing, and whether any of those options seems feasible.
Professional societies are facing growing resistance to place their publications in libraries. This results in these societies seeking arrangements with the largest commercial publishers, whose sway with libraries and especially library consortia is significant. Libraries have demonstrated a clear preference to work with the larger publishers over the smaller ones. This leads to increasing concentration and market power in the academic publishing industry.