The Oligarchy of Amazon
Robert Harington describes how the recent, under the radar launch of the Amazon Global Store is putting local businesses at risk.
Robert Harington describes how the recent, under the radar launch of the Amazon Global Store is putting local businesses at risk.
Hoping to woo authors away from commercial publishers, a group of biomedical science societies have launched a new alliance to promote the value of publishing in society journals.
Knowledge Unlatched has announced its “transformation into a central open access platform.” What does that mean, exactly? An interview with Managing Director Sven Fund.
Point: Counterpoint — today we revisit a pair of posts from Joe Esposito and Rick Anderson looking at partnerships and collaborations between university libraries and university presses.
Robert Harington attempts to help you think through how to develop a strategy for succession planning, recognizing that in today’s world, people just don’t stay at their jobs as long as they used to.
Green OA has not had a significant effect on subscriptions. What does — and doesn’t — that mean for subscriptions in the future?
What should publishers know about researchers and their work? Alice Meadows and Karin Wulf follow up a post earlier this year about “Seven Things Every Researcher Should Know about Scholarly Publishing.”
Is there a role for a curated, remixing approach to developing next generation textbooks. Robert Harington investigates the role of curated open textbooks in teaching today’s students, looking at some of the available tools, the way in which instructors utilize such tools, and issues around fair use of content.
Launching a new journal is a lot of work. This post looks at the basic “to do” list of logistical details that need to be done to successfully launch a new journal.
Revisiting Michael Clarke’s 2014 post on the two drivers of growth in STM and scholarly publishing: site licensing and global expansion. As successful as these activities have been, however, we appear to be nearing, if not a peak, at least a plateau. Institutional library budgets have not kept pace with the growth in global research output. At the same time, institutional market penetration is nearing saturation for many publishers.
So the question is, where is the growth going to come from?
University presses are not well positioned to thrive in journal publishing because they have not adopted any of the (relatively few and common) business strategies that are necessary, given market dynamics, for success. I do not put forth this thesis lightly. I have great affection and admiration for university presses, their value — craftsmanship, attention to detail, “getting it right”— and their mission. This is not admiration from afar: I served, in the formative years of my career, at the University of Chicago Press (Chicago), where I learned the tools of the trade and many of the practices and protocols of scholarly publishing still in use today. But after nearly two decades of observing university presses, from within and without, this thesis seems to be inescapable.
There are many programs now to create open access monographs, but the business models surrounding these efforts do not appear to be sufficiently robust to make the OA monograph sustainable. The problem is that the monograph is something that many people want, but few are willing to pay for.
What is the biggest misconception people have about scholarly publishing? That’s what we asked the Chefs this month. Now we’re asking you. What did we miss?
After many and long conversations among colleagues within and beyond the Scholarly Kitchen
about what researchers need to know about scholarly publishing, Alice Meadows and Karin Wulf compiled a list of what we think to be the most urgent issues.
Revisiting Joe Esposito’s post on distinguishing between features, products, and businesses. Not all features can become full-fledged businesses. Sometimes the best business case for a feature is to link it to an established business, where it adds value to assets that are already in place.