Macmillan + Springer: Some Lessons to Learn, Some Twists to Watch
The merger of Macmillan and Springer holds many lessons and some interesting twists. More than anything, it indicates a future in which scale continues to confer advantages.
The merger of Macmillan and Springer holds many lessons and some interesting twists. More than anything, it indicates a future in which scale continues to confer advantages.
A report from Simba Information tallies the total value of the open access marketplace, putting OA at 2.3% of the total market for STM journals. It documents as well, without comment, that more and more OA activity is the business of for-profit companies.
A Silicon Valley journalist has seen open access and deemed it disruptive. He’s 15+ years and scads of evidence behind the times, as we enter the post-disruption era.
A surprising set of recipients dominate a list of APC payments released by Wellcome Trust, suggesting that OA is not leading to a reshaping of the industry but perhaps merely driving further consolidation.
Publishers are always said to be slow-moving, but the pace of development at the CHORUS organization belies that.
As requested, here is a summary of all the things found so far through the FOIA requests regarding PubMed Central — from eLife to BMC to JMLA to conflicts of interest to coverups. It’s quite a fetch.
It is challenging to come up with an open access program for books that is financially sustainable. One strategy has been proposed by Unglue.it, which uses crowdfunding to purchases copyrights from authors.
eLife, BioMed Central (BMC), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), and the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) will be forming a new peer review consortium based around the concept of what eLife calls “portable peer review.”
A new financial analysis of open access and two major publishers suggests that many of the trends we’re seeing aren’t about adversarial ideas and win:lose propositions, but about relatively small market adjustments and incremental changes.
A reprint of an essay from 2008, which attempts to describe the evolution of open access publishing, Written before the astounding success of PLoS ONE, it outlines the link between open access publishing and the still-persistent traditional model.
PeerJ has the potential to create a divergent path to OA publishing, but its business model isn’t clear. As a service company, there are intangibles it needs to get right in the meantime.
While BioMed Central’s responses are a mixed bag, a new finding surfaces. And this one might just beat all.
Is there a new form of conflict of interest in the world: BioMed Central’s corporate sponsorship of author fees?
The commodity nature of the OA service seems to predict certain structural aspects, including lower prices and bigger journals.
The last few weeks of lively debate about OA in the Scholarly Kitchen have been informative, but have also involved a variety of mixed messages from all sides. There are assumptions being made that aren’t necessarily true, and arguments joined together that may in reality be at cross purposes.