In this episode of SSP’s Early Career Development Podcast, hosts Meredith Adinolfi (Cell Press) and Sara Grimme (Digital Science) chat with Magdalena Skipper, Editor-in-Chief of Nature and the first woman to lead the journal.
The new US policy on access to research publications suggests an acceleration in the shift toward open access. Christos Petrou examines what that would look like in different fields and for different journals.
Popular opinion to the contrary, scholarly publishing has not been disrupted. But only superior management can navigate the many challenges ahead.
In the shift beyond content licensing and towards supporting researcher workflow, Elsevier has few competitors. A key question is whether Digital Science and SpringerNature should be understood strategically as one company, or two. Who owns Digital Science?
Many of the finest scholarly publications can boast of exemplary editorial programs, but the advent of Gold Open Access, especially when mandated by funding agencies, may make this kind of editorial activity a thing of the past.
Elsevier’s new CiteScore service is a carefully thought-out element in the company’s competitive strategy, but it reinforces the widespread error that bibliometrics can be use as proxies for the quality of a publication.
Citation indexes need to provide standardized citation histograms for editors and publishers. Without them, it is unlikely that they will be widely adopted. At worse, it will encourage the production of histograms that selectively highlight or obscure the data.
A tour of four major “megajournals” and some of their neighbors finds a few common approaches and a few distinguishing features, but the entire category may need to be rethought given the lack of “mega” generally among the set.
While all publishers like to have a strong brand, some brands are so prestigious that they actually serve to paralyze the managements responsible for them, making it impossible to introduce innovations and to develop the business. Vast bureaucracies arrive whose purpose is not to develop the business but to protect the vaunted brand. This is a management problem, not a marketing one, but it can stymie a publisher from pursuing a progressive agenda.
Open access publishing has gone through a number of stages. Though different people will classify these stages in diverse ways, one way to view this is to say that since the initial period of advocacy for open access, commercial interests have entered this market and are now prepared to augment their positions by leveraging their elite brands, using them, as it were, to draw manuscripts for a family of cascading products.
A presentation to a scientific society on the current environment that STM publishers have to work in. Five issues are identified: regulatory matters, new technology, the structure of the marketplace, competition, and governance.
In this article we take a look at the start-up incubation business of Digital Science. Robert Harington acts as your unreliable narrator through a revealing conversation with Timo Hannay, Managing Director of Digital Science.
Gold open access publishing has proved to be successful, but it has certain limitations. This essay probes what those limitations are, but it argues that OA’s limitations do not outweigh its strengths. Gold OA most usefully coexists with traditional publishing models.
A new essay by Rick Anderson proposes that libraries begin to focus more strongly on special collections and migrate away from the collection of commodity content. This would have a dramatic impact on the structure of the marketplace for scholarly materials and would be more disruptive than anything currently being bandied about. That may not be a bad thing.
While we tend to think of publishing as an attempt to make objectively true comments about the quality of research, in fact publishing is driven by personality. Services that try to eliminate such personality are likely to see personality reassert itself in other ways.