The Information Landscape — How Do We Tackle the Problems Caused by Silicon Valley?
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.
Who Has All the Content?
Several services attempt to gather up “all” of the content across publishers. This post provides an overview and taxonomy.
Embrace the Bubble…or Burst it?
Along with recent hair-pulling about fake news has come renewed awareness of the concept of “filter bubbles,” as many of us acknowledge the risk of political information “bubbles” following the US presidential election. Where we once bemoaned “filter failure” – […]
Economics, Silicon Valley, and Information Warfare — Is Accuracy Becoming a Luxury Item? Or a Casualty?
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.
What We Can Learn from Fake News
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.
Why Technology Will Not Get Cheaper
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.
Guest Post, Adam Hodgkin: Do Books Need More Aggregation or More Curation — Time to Uncircle the Wagons?
Guest post from Adam Hodgkin, looking at the differences between the academic books and journals markets, and how the aggregation strategies for journals may not work in the same manner for books.
Coming Soon: Battles Over Academic Privacy — But Is This Fight Already Over?
How much is the privacy of academics worth? Judging by the behavior of most people, seemingly very little.
What the Heck is Amazon up to Now?
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 and the Four Horsemen of the Internet
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.
Interview with an Empire: Tim Collins, CEO of EBSCO Industries
Robert Harington asks Tim Collins for his views on publishing industry trends seen through the prism of his leadership role at EBSCO, exploring Tim’s sense of a connected world of stakeholders in today’s publishing industry.
The Network Model of Publishing
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.
The Knowledge Supply Chain in the Internet Age: Who Decides What Information Is Trustworthy?
Alison Mudditt presents a guest post from Julia Kostova and Patrick Alexander that asks questions about how information is vetted in the digital age, and what role scholarly publishers will continue to play.
Virtual Reality and the Scholarly Publisher
This time, Virtual Reality is not a gimmick. This post summarises my investigations and thoughts on the possibilities for VR in the context of scholarly publishing. Plus there’s a quick primer to get you started.
Another Big Win for Google Books (and for Researchers)
Google wins in court (again) as the Second Circuit of Appeals rules that its mass book digitization program qualifies as fair use. But Google is a commercial entity! And their files might get hacked! And their library partners are even more susceptible to copyright pirates than Google is! Yes, said the court, but. . .