Robert Harington comments on a New York Times article by Kate Murphy , published on Sunday 13th March, 2016, suggesting that when journalists write such an article they, do not fan the flames of fundamentalism, recognize the complexity at hand, and understand that there is a constructive debate to be had.
Revisiting Kent Anderson’s 2013 post discussing a study on library spending that suggests that the costs of journals have not increased as much as is commonly claimed, and that the increases seen are due to the increased volume being published.
Robert Harington asks Tim Collins for his views on publishing industry trends seen through the prism of his leadership role at EBSCO, exploring Tim’s sense of a connected world of stakeholders in today’s publishing industry.
SAGE recently announced that it has taken a minority stake in peer review start-up Publons. Charlie Rapple asks why publishers are investing in workflow tools, and why start-ups are accepting publishers’ money.
Kent Anderson returns to update his essential list of just what it is that publishers do.
A group of eight publishers today announced that, during 2016, they will begin requiring authors to use an ORCID identifier (iD) during the publication process. The first to do so is The Royal Society, which has introduced this requirement beginning January 1, 2016. In this interview, their Publishing Director, Stuart Taylor, explains why.
Robert Harington discusses Joe Esposito’s Scholarly Kitchen article from June 2015, entitled “The Mixed Marriage of For-profit and Not-for-Profit Publishing”, in context of his own experiences in the world of society publishing.
Library-based publishing is growing. A recent survey in Australia shows that “increasing visibility of the university brand” is a common objective. Charlie Rapple considers some of the challenges relating to brand for this growing sector.
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
Editors are quick to assume that reviewer fatigue is slowing them down; but one journal found that excessive invitations to review was not cited as a major reason why reviewers declined invitations.
The theme for SSP’s 2016 conference is Crossing Boundaries: New Horizons in Scholarly Communication. Here are some thoughts on a few of the boundaries that need to be crossed, not just at conferences but also in our community more generally.
Stop thinking of peer review as a concept and start thinking of it as a toolbox.
We spend much time these days wondering when the academic journal as we know it will cease to exist. Robert Harington discusses the role of the journal in light of a fascinating new venture in the field of mathematics – the overlay journal Discrete Analysis.
Welcome to the first – but hopefully not the last – Peer Review Week: an opportunity to celebrate the fundamental role played by peer review in scholarly communications, and the many diverse efforts to improve and support it.
Inspired by this year’s VIVO conference, this post looks at why we need a better understanding of how the scholarly research infrastructure works today in order to keep improving it for the future.