A View from the Outside — Trends and Challenges Consultants See in Scholarly Publishing
Input from more than a dozen consultants portrays an industry struggling to adapt to a dramatically different and rapidly changing information economy.
Beyond Labels — Does the Type of Business Matter?
The superficial distinction between non-profits and for-profits bears scrutiny. What are the true differences? Is either structure innately superior?
Data Visualization and Scale
A clever visualization that makes it easier to understand statistics about human populations be reducing their scale.
The Size of Things, Local Edition: Why Maps Are Wrong
Last Friday’s post looked at visualizations for the relative sizes of celestial objects. But for most of us, a Blue Supergiant Star remains something of an abstract concept. This week, a look closer to home.
A Quick Tour Around the World of Scholarly Journal Publishing
A presentation to the 2016 ISMTE US Conference. Something of a “state of our industry” overview, or perhaps, everything I needed to know I learned from the other bloggers at The Scholarly Kitchen.
Proof of Concept, Proof of Program, and Proof of Scale in Scholarly Communication
New scholarly-communication initiatives have to do more than just demonstrate proof of concept: they have to demonstrate ongoing sustainability (what we might call “proof of program”) and the ability to create desirable products in the amounts needed (what we might call “proof of scale”). What do these look like when they’re achieved, and how are some recent initiatives doing?
The Changing Nature of Scale in STM and Scholarly Publishing
Smaller independent and society publishers are finding it increasingly difficult to compete with the economies of scale around production, technology, and (most important) institutional sales that can be brought to bear by a large publisher. If you are a society that has been self-publishing for many decades, such effects may appear as only a recent headwind in a long publishing tradition. This headwind, however, is most likely not a temporary zephyr but rather a permanent fixture of the STM and scholarly publishing landscape, and one that will only increase in intensity. To understand why, it is helpful to look at the two vectors on which scale operates in STM and scholarly publishing: horizontal and vertical. While horizontal scale has long been the province of commercial publishers, society publishers are typically organized to take advantage of vertical scale. The headwinds are presently blowing along the horizontal plane, from the perspective of the society publisher.