Revisiting Joe Esposito’s post on the real world concerns of the research community. Although many people claim to know what scientists want, the author’s own ongoing survey has come up with results that are at odds with most conventional wisdom. This post summarizes those findings and identifies a near-universal view held by many scientists.
We were wrong to expect that online publishing would be cheaper and simpler than print. Acknowledging that, and facing the slower, more complicated commercial world it has created, could put us on a better path.
What’s wrong with peer review and article submission processes? What can publishers, authors, and reviewers do to improve the status quo?
HighWire’s John Sack looks at the changes that search engine indexing has driven for discovery of research publications. Part 2 of a two part series covering Anurag Acharya’s recent ALPSP keynote address.
January seems like the perfect time to look forward and think about what we might expect to see this coming year. This month we asked the Chefs what they think is on the horizon for 2016.
Kent Anderson returns to update his essential list of just what it is that publishers do.
With no clear benefits to researchers, a frustrating user experience, and no penalties for non-compliance, ClinicalTrials.gov is becoming increasingly irrelevant to clinical researchers and the world at large with each passing day. What does this mean for public access to research results? Is an obligation to patients putting themselves at risk in trials being breached? Why has it failed to live up to its potential?
Today, Elsevier is announcing that it has acquired SSRN, the preprint and publishing community that focuses on social sciences and law. Among other things, the SSRN acquisition is another step in Elsevier’s path towards data and analytics. In a number of ways, Mendeley is the linchpin for this acquisition. More generally, this acquisition plainly indicates Elsevier’s interest in the open access repository space. Finally, universities, their libraries, and other publishers, should have on their minds some of the policy and governance issues around the data that Elsevier is accumulating and the uses to which they may be put.
IP authentication is the most important mechanism for authorizing access to licensed e-resources resources. Substantial business and policy issues for libraries and publishers alike connect up to IP authentication. Today, there is substantial interest in eliminating IP authentication, so it is timely to examine the implications if we were soon to see its end.
University presses are not well positioned to thrive in journal publishing because they have not adopted any of the (relatively few and common) business strategies that are necessary, given market dynamics, for success. I do not put forth this thesis lightly. I have great affection and admiration for university presses, their value — craftsmanship, attention to detail, “getting it right”— and their mission. This is not admiration from afar: I served, in the formative years of my career, at the University of Chicago Press (Chicago), where I learned the tools of the trade and many of the practices and protocols of scholarly publishing still in use today. But after nearly two decades of observing university presses, from within and without, this thesis seems to be inescapable.
Yesterday, Ithaka S+R published findings from our triennial survey of library deans and directors at academic institutions in the United States. The report examines the strategic directions of academic libraries as well as their staffing and spending plans for the coming years. The pivot towards new research, teaching, and learning services, and towards distinctive collections, is continuing, although it is encountering some headwinds.
A new study from Oxford University Press further documents the decline of reference resources, a category of scholarly material more than ready for an innovative era in its evolution.
In a move entirely consistent with its strategy to pivot beyond content licensing, Elsevier has acquired bepress, the institutional repository provider.
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.
In this update, the focus shifts to the value journal publishers offer, and who benefits.