This is a presentation on consolidation in scholarly communications. It provides a primer on how companies look at acquisitions, how they are financed, and why they are likely to continue. The presentation also touches on start-ups and venture capital.
Today, we grapple with privacy issues as consumers, as citizens, and as voters. As an industry, we should be thinking about how to draw not only on policy but also on technical architecture to balance privacy and innovation. When the stars align, an entirely different architecture for the control of user data is possible. What would such a shift mean for scholarly publishing and academic libraries?
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.
As online systems for discovering and distributing content have grown, so too has the need for unambiguous identification of people and the parties exchanging that content. Several systems have been in development in the past couple of years, notably the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) and the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) system. How these two systems relate, engage each other, and serve community needs isn’t always clear. In hopes of alleviating some of the confusion, I sat down with Laura Dawson from Bowker to discuss the International Standard Name Identifier, how it relates to ORCID, and other issues surrounding identity management systems.
As communications in science begin to incorporate data elements more routinely, the standards for describing these, versioning these, and preserving these have to be considered. And we will all have to learn how to use data labeling processes correctly.