Open access (OA) publishing seeks to eliminate paywalls for users. It has largely succeeded, but new diversions and distractions built into the commercial Internet may create new barriers that will be harder to deal with.
Algorithms behave in ways even their creators can’t understand, yet they dominate how we share and see information. Do we need a “Three Laws for Algorithms”?
Science’s historical progress can’t be assumed. It has to be reclaimed, re-established. That’s more difficult in a fragmented information space geared for extremism.
Meta has been acquired by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The arrangement will speed up the pace of scientific research and have an impact on scientific publishing.
Information warfare is both tactical and strategic, with much of its success stemming from the weakened economics of the current information economy. Scholarly publishers have experienced this in many ways, from Google Scholar to predatory publishers to pre-print archives — all answers to the calls for “free information” and all revealing tactical and strategic vulnerabilities as accuracy and facts become luxury items in the information war.
The age of information abundance may have fundamental flaws — barriers to entry that create false equivalence; dissemination tools that conflate fake information with responsible sources; self-reinforcing loops of conspiracy and paranoia; and social fragmentation that makes societal disruption more likely. What can be done? Here are a few ideas.
Fake News is making headlines as questions about how dubious stories may have influenced the US election. This post explores the damage done to reputable news organizations and what scholarly publishers could learn from the whole thing.
A post election look at what publishers can learn from the process.
The long-desired hope that digital publishing will be cheaper gets more cold water, as infrastructure and personnel costs continue to rise, with no real end in sight.
How much is the privacy of academics worth? Judging by the behavior of most people, seemingly very little.
Although Amazon is a central player in many areas of publishing and media, it is hard to predict where it will head next. This makes it hard to plan to compete with it. On the other hand, Amazon has some typical ways that it behaves when it enters a market and strategic planners can learn from them.
Sci-Hub sets a reprehensible example, but publishers cannot be content simply to stamp out such services. In order to evolve the industry into the future, publishers have to provide services that make Sci-Hub and its ilk seem old-fashioned and inconvenient to use.
Last week’s surprisingly successful social media campaign was a winning event for libraries, archives, and museums.
One of the unanticipated consequences of the introduction of digital media to scholarly publishing is that publishing properties increasingly are organized into networks, with one property pointing to another for the benefit of all. This essay describes the network publishing model and comments on some of a network’s characteristics and economic opportunities.
A number of recent articles have posited the idea that information distribution on the Internet is undergoing a massive change – driven by the failure of site advertising and subscriptions as a general purpose economic model, and the rise of mobile powered social media as the discovery tool of these times. To what extent is this way of thinking applicable to scholarly publishing?