Mendeley, Connotea, and the Perils of Free Services
Free services and open access are distorting the publishing world. Will the big only get bigger?
How Valuable Is PubMed Central's Early Publication of eLife Content?
What is the likely value of what PubMed Central is providing to eLife by publishing them free online, providing PubMed indexing without delay, and getting them into the market six months early?
CC-Huh? Fundamental Confusions About the Role of Copyright and the Reuse of Data
A fundamental confusion between articles and data leads to a call for more CC licenses and less copyright. But why are data being closed down while articles are being opened up? Is there a fundamental misunderstanding of copyright, licensing, and rights?
Are Open Access Initiatives "Catastrophic" for Commercial Publishers?
An analyst frets that Elsevier might suffer from the trends in OA publishing and its mandates. But there’s no logical or practical reason to believe this.
Driving Innovation: Finding the Balance Between Fair Reward and Profiteering
Vitriol may have obscured important points in a post last week. The growing business strategy of our era is to drive the cost of everyone else’s product to zero in order to make more money from your own product. This imbalance stifles innovation and creation.
PeerJ: Silicon Valley Culture Enters Academic Publishing
PeerJ is bringing something new to scholarly publishing, but it’s not a business model or a technology approach — it’s a mindset.
The Risks of Launching a New Services Business — Branding, Cash Flow, and the Fraught Start of PeerJ
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.
Publishers — What Are They Good For?
Time for your input for a session at the upcoming SSP Annual Meeting — pose your questions now!
Crossing the Rubicon — Is the UK Going to Enable Open Access for All Taxpayer-Funded Research by 2014?
The UK Government Science Minister articulates a plan for open access and open data for UK research. The implications aren’t clear, but the intentions are.
The Risks of Risk Aversion
Leadership at organizations of all kinds often justifies inaction with the statement, “We’re risk averse.” But is being risk-averse itself courting a set of risks? Is there any risk-free choice?
"Predatory" Open Access Publishers — The Natural Extreme of an Author-Pays Model
A profile of predatory author-pays OA publishers pulls a punch or two, but reveals that all models have extremes. What we do to make these extremes truly marginal and unacceptable is a larger question.
The Research Works Act: Is It Time For a Rally To Restore Sanity?
When it comes to discussions about access, the silent majority focused on doing science is presented with real choices, not all of which square with the scorched-earth rhetoric that too often dominates.
The Costs of Print
The question of when print will end is often framed as if it is a natural occurrence, an evolutionary question, or the likely outcome of a sporting event, rather than a business decision that publishers may revisit on a regular basis.
Can Amazon and Apple Peacefully Coexist? Probably, But As for Google…
The Google Era isn’t over by a long shot, but initiatives from Apple and Amazon reveal that the search giant is open to disintermediation by some clever and large-scale commercial tactics.
Separating The Threads: What Is the Link Between Access and Profitability?
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.