The Publishing Community Should More Actively Oppose Book Bans
With a lawsuit filed last week Pen America, Penguin Random House, authors, and parents began fighting book bans. Other publishers should help.
Guest Post – GPT-3 Wrote an Entire Paper on Itself. Should Publishers be Concerned?
Saikiran Chandha discusses the impact of GPT-3 and related models on research, the potential question marks, and the steps that scholarly publishers can take to protect their interests.
Revisiting: Will the Future of Scholarly Communication Be Pluralistic and Democratic, or Monocultural and Authoritarian?
Rick Anderson revisits a 2020 post: One way or another, the #scholcomm community is going to choose either a diversity of publishing models or a monoculture, because it can’t have both. How will this choice be made, and by whom?
Q: Can You Revoke a Creative Commons License? A: No. Er… Sort Of? Maybe?
A Creative Commons license is irrevocable; it says so right in the license. But it also says you can change your mind and distribute the work differently, or not at all. What does this mean?
Fraud and Peer Review: An Interview with Melinda Baldwin
Robert Harington and Melinda Baldwin discuss whether peer review has a role to play in uncovering scientific fraud.
The Cell Press Inclusion and Diversity Statement — An Interview with Deborah Sweet
Deborah Sweet of Cell Press discusses their recently introduced Inclusion and Diversity Statement in this interview with Alice Meadows
Why You Should Care about Open Access: An Open Letter to Scholarly and Scientific Authors
If you’re a scholarly and scientific author and you think the open access movement is irrelevant to your interests, think again.
One Author’s Novel Approach to Article Self-Publishing: An Interview with Allyson Mower
An author found that the relevant journals were unwilling to publish an article of historical research that found evidence for a surprising and somewhat controversial proposition about the founding of the University of Utah. So what did she decide to do with her article? Something rather unusual, it turns out.
Is Copyright Piracy Morally Wrong or Merely Illegal? The Malum Prohibitum/Malum in Se Conundrum
Is copyright infringement malum prohibitum (wrong only because it’s prohibited) or malum in se (morally wrong in and of itself)? Interestingly, scholcomm commentators and legal reference materials often characterize it as the former–while both statute and case law treat it like the latter, classifying it as “property theft” and regularly awarding its victims both statutory and punitive damages.
Focusing on Value — 102 Things Journal Publishers Do (2018 Update)
In this update, the focus shifts to the value journal publishers offer, and who benefits.
Managing the Cost Burden — Is the Pendulum Swinging Back to the Individual Market?
The pendulum for revenues swung from personal subscriptions to institutional subscriptions with the rise of digital options. With growth capped, a new mix of access options is likely to emerge.
Caught in the Middle — Can Publishers Resolve Contradictory Expectations?
A session at ALPSP shines a light on why publishers are caught in an impossible situation — satisfying customers who demand different things at different times, and who are not aligned around the ultimate benefit they all seek to deliver.
What If Academic and Scholarly Publishers Paid Research Authors?
It’s a question that has lurked around the edges of our campfire for a while — what if publishers paid authors of research papers? Quickly, it becomes clear why this is very unlikely to happen — for financial, ethical, and practical reasons.
Scholarly-Communication Reform: Why Is it So Hard to Talk About, and Where are the Authors?
Why is it so frustrating and difficult to talk about scholarly-communication reform, and why do those conversations seem to involve virtually all members of the scholcomm ecosystem except for authors?
The New(ish) Kids on the Block – Touring the Megajournals
A tour of four major “megajournals” and some of their neighbors finds a few common approaches and a few distinguishing features, but the entire category may need to be rethought given the lack of “mega” generally among the set.