Guest Post, Tony Sanfilippo: University Press Publishing Under an Autocracy
Ohio State University Press’ Tony Sanfilippo weighs in on the role of academic publishers in the current political climate.
Have You Looked At This? Nuzzel.com
It was named as one of the top apps of 2016 by both The New York Times and Time magazine. But what makes it cool?
STM Week 2016 — Stray Thoughts on Security, Open Access, and Data
[…] doing this not because they are content companies, but because they are data companies. It’s like the old saw about newspapers, which were, in their heyday, advertising sheets with news in the spaces between the ads. Now, it’s data companies […]
Anonymity Meets Aggression on Web 2.0
Web 2.0 may be shattering the established control of elite media. In their place are loud and aggressive voices.
Institutional Conservatism in Scholarly Communications: Thoughts from UKSG’s One-day Conference
[…] and where early career researchers are expected to have a “balanced publishing portfolio”, including monographs and journals, but also popular periodicals, blogs, newspapers and so on. She advocated for more guidance from publishers, institutions and societies to help scholars know how and where best to […]
Economics, Silicon Valley, and Information Warfare — Is Accuracy Becoming a Luxury Item? Or a Casualty?
Information warfare is both tactical and strategic, with much of its success stemming from the weakened economics of the current information economy. Scholarly publishers have experienced this in many ways, from Google Scholar to predatory publishers to pre-print archives — all answers to the calls for “free information” and all revealing tactical and strategic vulnerabilities as accuracy and facts become luxury items in the information war.
How To Live Safely in a Post Factual Universe
2016, The. Laughs. Just. Keep. Coming… This is a post about how events in the non-scholarly publishing world are going to have a very big impact on us. Question is, what are we going to do about what’s going on?
Gladwell & Nielsen: The Fixed Costs of Fixed Ideas
[…] in hell for these thoughts.) Nielsen updates Clayton Christensen‘s ideas of “disruptive innovation” and draws out nice lessons from how newspapers are being disrupted by blogs. He has nice passages about how the cost basis of new approaches can diverge […]
Revisiting: Why Hasn’t Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted Already?
[…] research. Put another way, the Web was designed to disrupt scientific publishing. It was not designed to disrupt bookstores, telecommunications, matchmaking services, newspapers, pornography, stock trading, music distribution, or a great many other industries. And yet it has. It is breathtaking to […]
The Freedom of Not Owning Books
[…] can locate and purchase books no newstand or bookstore nearby would ever carry. Finally, through subscriptions to blogs, magazines, and newspapers, information updates are delivered as they sleep but no paper accumulates. Consider how many encyclopedias you’ve purchased in the […]
A Quick Tour Around the World of Scholarly Journal Publishing
[…] age more gracefully and more successfully than nearly any other media. Compare where we are with the current state of newspapers or magazines. They’re struggling for their very survival while we’re expanding and experimenting with new business models, new technologies […]
What Puts #seriousacademics Off Social Media?
A recent article by a young researcher, “I’m a serious academic, not a professional Instagrammer”, has spawned a range of responses under the #seriousacademic hashtag. Charlie Rapple summarizes, and considers why it is that “serious” academics might choose not to use social media.
The Power of Community — Why Much of Scholarly Publishing Is Unlikely to Change Quickly
[…] define science in its myriad forms, and the durability of these communities’ journals. Community journals, as I’ll call them, are like local newspapers in a way, but the community they bind can be worldwide. These journals sprang up within a community and […]
Guest Post: Richard Fisher on The Monograph: Keep On Keepin’ On*, Part Two
In Part Two, Richard Fisher looks at the past, the present and the future of monograph publishing in the humanities and social sciences.
The Consumer Price Index and the Argument for OA
[…] rent, clothing, heating oil, and home insurance all factor into the CPI, as do the prices of used cars, gasoline, newspapers and magazines, a can of tuna and a pair of jeans. Yet the basket of goods that is used […]