Many CEOs of publishing companies find themselves having to manage two companies: the established company and an in-house start-up that is designed to participate in a new paradigm based on digital media. Organizationally this is a very difficult situation to be in, but it is essential if a company is going to persist in the years ahead.
A new essay by Rick Anderson proposes that libraries begin to focus more strongly on special collections and migrate away from the collection of commodity content. This would have a dramatic impact on the structure of the marketplace for scholarly materials and would be more disruptive than anything currently being bandied about. That may not be a bad thing.
An expert on the semantic Web, structured markup, and the emerging area of research data services talks about the current state of play.
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.
PLoS has announced the departure of both its CEO and CFO, but has provided no explanation of what led to the management change. PLoS should explain the situation to all its shareholders.
The recent sale of Mendeley exposed surprisingly naive perspectives on the company’s clear and inherent goals. Other venture capital plays are afoot in scientific publishing and academia. When will we stop being the prey?
The journals business has not been disrupted and does not appear likely to be disrupted for some time. Journals publishers continue to dominate the institutional market and are seeking to coopt Gold OA services.
Though social networking websites continue to proliferate, turning them into sustainable, revenue-generating businesses is still a difficult prospect. For sites based on the illegal distribution of copyrighted material, the process is even more difficult. Is it possible for a pirate to become a respected member of the business community?
Elsevier acquires Mendeley, changing the game significantly, perhaps for most of us.
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.
Free services and open access are distorting the publishing world. Will the big only get bigger?
The herd of social sharing sites in the sciences is being culled. And one — Mendeley — may be assimilated by Elsevier.
In a story of the modern age of fraud, spoofers find their way into peer-review rosters, reviewing their own papers or those of their friends/competitors.
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.
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.