Elsevier Acquires SSRN

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.

Trust, Privacy, Big Data, and e-Book Readers

At the opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair this year, a pre-meeting session was held called CONTEC. This follow-up to the much beloved, but now defunct, O’Reilly Tools of Change conference brought together an interesting mix of leadership from traditional […]

Altmetrics – Trying to Fill the Gap

With the speed of communication today, researchers, authors, and grant funders are impatient to get an indicator of its value. Waiting 1-3 years for publication and citation seems interminable. Conflating an article’s impact with its journals’ impact creates uncertainty, as […]