Elsevier Acquires SSRN

Today, Elsevier is announcing that it has acquired SSRN, the preprint and publishing community that focuses on social sciences and law. Among other things, the SSRN acquisition is another step in Elsevier’s path towards data and analytics. In a number of ways, Mendeley is the linchpin for this acquisition. More generally, this acquisition plainly indicates Elsevier’s interest in the open access repository space. Finally, universities, their libraries, and other publishers, should have on their minds some of the policy and governance issues around the data that Elsevier is accumulating and the uses to which they may be put.

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.

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.

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.

Dismantling the Stumbling Blocks that Impede Researchers’ Access to E-Resources

Content providers operate in the systems ecosystem of the licensing academic library, but they have been challenged to integrate their offerings as seamlessly into this ecosystem as would benefit researchers. To adapt, publishers need to examine not only the usability of their own platforms and how they can continue to be improved, but also how they are in practice used in scholarly research alongside other content platforms and intermediary services. As distance learning continues its inexorable growth and research practices continue to anticipate always-connected devices, it is becoming more urgent for libraries, content providers, and other intermediaries to work together to address these problems.

Article Sharing on Scholarly Collaboration Networks – An Interview with Fred Dylla about STM’s Draft Guidelines and Consultation

The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers recently launched a consultation, requesting feedback from all stakeholders about their draft principles on article sharing on scholarly communication networks. Find out more about how and why these principles are needed and what the consultation hopes to achieve, n this interview with Fred Dylla, Executive Director and CEO of the American Institute of Physics, and project lead for the initiative.

Data for Discovery

The benefits of personalizing discovery are already playing themselves out in the consumer space, suggesting tremendous opportunities for using data to personalize the research process. Given the scale of data needed for effective personalization, the implications of changing discovery processes will cascade through the scholarly ecosystem.

Big Sister: Some Beneficial Aspects of Collecting User Data

The collection of end-user data is going to become more important for all publishers and may serve to describe those publishers that will be most successful in the coming years. Although data-collection is often thought to be a malignant instance of “Big Brotherism,” it may in fact be benign when implemented thoughtfully.

Marketing in the Stream

Social media presents a new set of marketing opportunities for publishers, the most important of which is a new paradigm for thinking about the world of digital media, which now is the world of the social stream instead of the world of cyberspace.