Robert Harington talks to Mandy Hill, Managing Director of Academic Publishing at Cambridge University Press in this new series of perspectives from some of publishing’s leaders across the non-profit and profit sectors of our industry.
Major scholarly publishers have made substantial investments in preprints in recent years, integrating preprint deposit into manuscript submission workflows.
Earlier this month, Cambridge University Press and the University of California announced a new Read & Publish (R&P) agreement, likely the largest such agreement to date in North America. Today, Roger Schonfeld interviews Cambridge’s Mandy Hill, Managing Director, and Chris Bennett, Global Sales Director, about this new agreement.
The recently announced agreement between ResearchGate and Springer Nature, Cambridge University Press, and Thieme demonstrates that there is not a uniformity of perspective in the publishing community about article sharing on ResearchGate, or presumably on the many other scholarly collaboration networks that exist. It also signals that ResearchGate, a decade-old start-up disruptor with with venture capital investment and a rapidly grown user base, has taken its place at the negotiating table and found not just enemies but allies.
As Sci-Hub has grown, it has come to play a larger and larger role in scholarly communications overall. At this time its presence can be felt in the background of every major strategic situation publishers face.
The recent attempt by China to censor scholarship points to a growing set of challenges in information dissemination. Blaming the publisher obscures these issues.
University presses bring a diversity not only of costs, scale, and business models, but also of organizational capacity, incentives, and objectives. As efforts are mounted to transition monograph publishing to open access, it is vital that we recognize the richness and complexity of this community.
University presses are enjoying something of a renaissance in the UK, as was evident at the recent University Press Redux conference in Liverpool. Why is this, and how are presses trying to reconcile mission, innovation and sustainability in the digital world? And what can they teach the rest of us?
Although we in scholarly publishing typically focus on the problems we face, there is a small group of highly successful journal publishers. These publishers fall into three broad categories. To a great extent, these publishers are resistant to challenge.
The Oxford English Dictionary’s overarching definition of the transitive verb “publish” is “to make public.” An early use, dating to 1382 is “to prepare and issue copies of (a book, newspaper, piece of music, etc.).” This is probably how most […]
The competition among the largest journal publishers to acquire the rights to professional society publications is very keen. The bidding for these publications is likely to result in an alteration of strategy, whereby the bidding publishers seek to bind the societies more closely to them.
The Journal of Cultural Anthropology is now becoming open access. This points to one path a professional society can follow if it cannot derive significant income from library sales or if its membership is more interested in wider dissemination of material than the uses income from journals can be put to.
The university press world is operating under circumstances that are somewhat tighter than they were even a few years ago. While most presses now publish ebooks, ebooks in themselves do not provide a strategic path to growth.
There is a predictable path for society publishers as they explore their options. Their programs may be under pressure today, leading many of them to seek alliances with large commercial firms, though many societies are unhappy to do so.
The GSU case serves as a strong rebuke for publishers over fair use and copyright claims, while recognizing that some boundaries remain.