Guest Post — Academic Publishers Are Missing the Point on ChatGPT
Avi Staiman discusses the value that ChatGPT can bring to scholarly communication, particularly leveling the playing field for English as an Additional Language authors.
Thoughts on AI’s Impact on Scholarly Communications? An Interview with ChatGPT
An interview with ChatGPT on issues related to scholarly communication.
Imposters and Impersonators in Preprints: How do we trust authors in Open Science?
Preprints play a crucial role in open science but offer an opportunity to be gamed. Fictitious authorship in preprints show that open science needs checks and we need to collaborate to govern Open Science.
If My AI Wrote this Post, Could I Own the Copyright?
Todd Carpenter reports on a forum hosted by WIPO and the Copyright Office that focused on whether copyright can apply to the works created by artificial intelligence systems.
Guest Post — The Dissertation Publication Requirement: It’s Time for Reexamination
Guest author Rob Schlesinger encourages a rethink of the common requirement that graduate students publish their dissertations.
Does It Matter Whose Name Appears After the © When Using Creative Commons?
Authors are increasingly applying Creative Commons licenses to their content, when publishing it via Open Access. But after deciding to use a CC license, does it matter whether copyright is transferred to the publisher or if it is retained by the author. For some reasons, transfer to the publisher might be the right choice.
PeerJ Membership Model and The Paradox Of The Loyal Customer
Pivoting away from individual memberships to sources of institutional funding, PeerJ has entered into a crowded market of low-cost megajournals. Can it survive?
Supply, Demand, and the Subscription Model in Scholarly Publishing — An Analysis
An overview of usage trends across libraries and journals indicates that usage is generally stable or up, archives remain of interest, and consumption doesn’t align with authorship or funding.
Journals and Politicians — A Marriage for Mutual Benefit? Or a Temporary Alignment of Interests?
President Obama has published three articles in six months in three of the world’s most prestigious scholarly journals. Is it appropriate? With these precedents, what happens when the politics of the President conflicts with the politics of science?
The Future of Authorship
Dismayed by the loss of trust in facts, and seeming preference for half-truths that appears to be driving our political present, Robert Harington decided to catch up on his reading over the weekend, and stumbled across a stimulating article in Publishers Weekly, entitled How to Sell Nearly a Half-Million Copies of a Poetry Book, by Anisse Gross.
Think. Check. Submit. (How to Have Trust in Your Publisher.)
Charlie Rapple reports on “Think. Check. Submit.”, a campaign to help researchers learn who they can trust when they are seeking to publish their work.
Conveying Understanding: That Grumpy Essay in the New York Times
Technology is great, but does it deserve top billing? Leon Wieseltier’s essay in the New York Times as well as articles by other academics raise a challenge to the information industry as a whole.
When a Scholar is One Among 500, What Does it Mean to be "An Author"?
Last week, an editorial in Nature highlighted the problem of the proliferating number of authors on papers. Following a 2012 symposium at Harvard University, a small group has proposed a taxonomy of contributor roles that would add details to an author list and have tested that among a group of authors. Scholarly publishers should consider adopting this taxonomy to improve the accuracy and granularity to improve attribution and the assignment of credit.
Copyright Transfer As a Click-through – It’s So Easy to Sign Away Your Rights
Click-through agreements are efficient for publishers and software companies to offer, but is it right for this efficiency to cloud the rights picture? Can’t we create systems that are slightly more subtle and customized?
Metrics and Meaning — Can We Find Relevance and Quality Without Measurements?
Putting metrics and altmetrics into perspective can help us separate secondary signals from primary signals, and may lead to a greater appreciation of alternatives to metrics, or alt2metrics.