In this article Robert Harington suggests that some society journal publishers may wish to consider moving their journal program to a Diamond open access (OA) model. Nice idea right, but easier said than done.
Pivoting away from individual memberships to sources of institutional funding, PeerJ has entered into a crowded market of low-cost megajournals. Can it survive?
Robert Harington takes the reader on a tour of copyright law, suggesting that its value is in supporting our ability to teach and do research, and publish high quality works.
What do people mean when they say scholarly publishing is “ripe for disruption”? Where might such disruption come from, and what will drive its success?
Robert Harington references our current altered state in politics as a tool to reflect on the need to invoke balance in publishing innovation, and growth.
Robert Harington grapples with the lack of understanding by the publishing elites on all sides of shifting ideologies of an individual’s relationship to information on the web.
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.
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.
Smaller independent and society publishers are finding it increasingly difficult to compete with the economies of scale around production, technology, and (most important) institutional sales that can be brought to bear by a large publisher. If you are a society that has been self-publishing for many decades, such effects may appear as only a recent headwind in a long publishing tradition. This headwind, however, is most likely not a temporary zephyr but rather a permanent fixture of the STM and scholarly publishing landscape, and one that will only increase in intensity. To understand why, it is helpful to look at the two vectors on which scale operates in STM and scholarly publishing: horizontal and vertical. While horizontal scale has long been the province of commercial publishers, society publishers are typically organized to take advantage of vertical scale. The headwinds are presently blowing along the horizontal plane, from the perspective of the society publisher.
Michael Clarke looks at some of the growth avenues in scholarly communications.
In an increasingly open world, should more subscription journals be converted to OA? And if so, why, how, and when?
As we drift into a scholarly economy with centralized payment mechanisms and greater dependence on government funding, are we truly setting ourselves up for long-term independence and success?
As ORCID comes close to reaching it’s goals for registrations, the organization is not yet financially stable. Laurel Haak, executive director of ORCID, answers questions about where they are at and what is coming for users and members.
Revisiting a 2012 post to ask, do journal authors really give their articles away for free to publishers?
Three Scholarly Kitchen chefs talk about the uses and misuses of the term “disruption” in describing what’s going on in the scholarly publishing market.