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. . .
Guest Post: HighWire’s John Sack on Online Indexing of Scholarly Publications: Part 1, What We All Have Accomplished
HighWire’s John Sack looks at the changes that search engine indexing has driven for discovery of research publications. Part 1 of a two part series covering Anurag Acharya’s recent ALPSP keynote address.
A Single User Account
Academics’ expectations for user experience are set not by reference to improvements relative to the past but increasingly in comparison with their experiences on consumer internet services and mobile devices. The best solution for research, teaching, and learning would be a single account for each user, controlled by that individual, and accepted portably across services and platforms.
Summertime and the Reading Is Easy
My nominee for a summer reading book, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. This is a humorous book set in San Francisco. It playfully describes the clash between the new technology and the old world of printed books.
Surveillance and the Scholarly World: What Shall We Do With The Database of Intentions?
When we talk about impact and metrics and understanding the customer, we are actually talking about surveillance data. We should have an open debate about what this means.
An Archaeology of Discovery
How valuable is the brand? It depends on the ecosystem or publishing epoch. Brands were the hallmark of the print era, but with the advent of new publishing paradigms, brands now compete with other useful means to identify materials.
Grab and Go and the Gravitational Pull of Discovery
A look at Facebook’s Instant Article initiative and what it means for discovery and for publishers.
Discovery and Access in Light of the Ebola Outbreak
Several researchers recently “stumbled across” an article indicating the reasonable likelihood that Liberia would be faced with cases of Ebola. Public health officials had not acted on this known likelihood. The question is why.