Guest Post — Fiesole 2025: A Step Back to Move Forward in the Era of ‘Postnormal Publishing’
A report from this year’s Fiesole Retreat: Learning from the Past, Informing the Future.
How the SDGs Are Shaping the Research Agenda, and What Publishers Need to Know and Do
Insights from a recent study looking at how the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are influencing research, including recommendations for publishers’ next steps.
Guest Post: Time to Rethink Usage Analytics
Users (human and machine) are accessing scholarly content in new ways, challenging traditional usage analytics models. In this guest post, Tim Lloyd outlines the challenges ahead in quantifying usage.
Professor, can you take us through your theory in layman’s terms? … No.
Armstrong & Miller on the challenges of getting academics to communicate work in simple terms. Or perhaps the challenges of people expecting you to be able to communicate something complicated in simple terms.
Researchers’ Social License – in Need of Renewal?
Social license, in the context of research, is a form of public ‘approval’ that ensures research is funded, that its results are respected, and that participation is willingly engaged in, where needed. For many reasons, it seems as if researchers’ current social license is in danger of being revoked. Charlie Rapple explores what might be required to ensure it is renewed.
Where is the Publication Puck Going? Making Research Available “Upstream” of Publication
Could scholarly publishers’ skills and capacity be re-positioned to serve researchers at earlier stages in the research process, “upstream” of publication? Charlie Rapple shares findings from a survey of the communications needs of almost 10,000 researchers.
Quality Criteria in Scholarship and Science: Proposing a Visualization of Their Interactions
Proposing a model for thinking about the interactions of rigor, cogency, accessibility, significance, openness, and impact in scholarly quality.
Transforming Research, in the Face of Uncertainty, Scarcity, and Bias
Last week’s Transforming Research conference in Baltimore, MD, gathered a range of speakers across the academic and professional spectrum. Charlie Rapple highlights some of the new research that was shared, and draws out some of the prevalent themes.
When Do Citations Reflect "Impact?"
Citation practices vary between and within STM and HSS; they also vary by discipline and within disciplines. Though citation metrics presume evidence of “impact,” in fact a citation may represent a range of intentions. Given the emphasis on citation indices, isn’t it important to query what scholars are actually doing when they cite another scholar’s work?
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.
Challenges, Connections, Conversations, and Collaboration – Lessons from the May 2015 ORCID-CASRAI Conference
The recent ORCID-CASRAI conference in Barcelona brought together over 150 researchers, research administrators, funders, publishers, vendors, and others working in scholarly communications to discuss research evaluation, with a particular focus on social science and humanities – resulting in some interesting conversations and observations
Tweaking Twitter
Social media giant (and information tool) Twitter has casually suggested to its users that it might be changing its algorithm. But has it considered what the implications for users might be? The users have and they are worried.