Ensuring the Sustainability of Print
Mindful of ecological factors, decision-making regarding print production shifts, balancing innovation with pragmatism.
Guest Post — Shared Print & Sustainability through the Looking Glass
This is the second in our two-part series highlighting the need for shared print, as a community of membership programs working in parallel to a common goal of long term preservation and access to print resources, to evolve in order to become a more cohesive and sustainable national effort
Guest Post — Shared Print Down the Rabbit Hole
Libraries’ ability to steward print collections in the future is being compromised by how we manage them now. How can we evolve our shared print strategy to align with the core values of libraries, and to increase the value proposition of print collections. Part 1 of 2.
Guest Post – Open Access to University Press Frontlists: A Call to Action
Now, two decades into the OA movement, it is high time for university libraries and presses to finally create a future for OA monographs.
Guest Post — Navigating the Sustainability Landscape: A New STM Roadmap Provides a Guide to Embedding Sustainability in Publishing
The STM Association has launched an SDG roadmap. It is a list of suggested steps to provide inspiration and pathways to navigate the sustainability initiatives and actions that publishers and societies can undertake.
Smorgasbord: Trends from the Spring 2023 Meetings and Conferences
It’s conference season in scholarly communications. Between them, the Scholarly Kitchen Chefs have been / will be at 9 events around the world in the 6 week stretch from early April to mid May. In a series of “Smorgasbord” posts, Chefs will share some of the key themes emerging for our sector. This week: Charlie Rapple reports from EARMA, Roy Kaufman from the London Book Fair, and David Crotty from STM.
Building a Sustainable Research Infrastructure
What does a strong and sustainable research infrastructure look like? How close are we to building one? What improvements are needed? This summary of a recent SSP webinar addresses these questions and more.
Ask The Chefs: Competition And Cooperation
How does scholarly communications benefit from coopetition, the cooperation of competitors? Come see what the Chefs said and tell us your thoughts!
Learning Lessons from DPLA
A not-for-profit library collaborative, the Digital Public Library of America, laid off six members of its small team and is announcing a strategic pivot. What are some of the broader lessons that we can learn about innovation and collaboration in the scholarly communications sector?
The Race to the Bottom — Short-term Bargains versus Long-term Vitality
Haggling for cheaper content today will certainly have hidden and unpleasant costs — large and small — down the road.
The Open Access Monograph
There are many programs now to create open access monographs, but the business models surrounding these efforts do not appear to be sufficiently robust to make the OA monograph sustainable. The problem is that the monograph is something that many people want, but few are willing to pay for.
Stick To Your Ribs: A Library Card Under the Christmas Tree
Revisiting a holiday classic: ‘Twas the month before Christmas, and by listening hard, you can hear Joe Esposito yearn for a library card. The reasons are simple, yet give publishers pause. No wonder Joe’s only hope is with Santa Claus.
What Does "Unsustainable" Mean?
We breeze by the statement that “scholarly publishing economics are unsustainable,” without contemplating what it actually means, how deep it goes, and why it has been allowed to get this way.
Is PeerJ Membership Publishing Sustainable?
The details of PeerJ’s business model raise many questions, some of which may pertain to inherent Silicon Valley ways of doing business, others to efforts to create a community of required activity.
Stage Five Book Publishing — How to Go Beyond “Sustainability” and Into “Viability”
Book publishing is evolving in stages, and when we get to Stage Five, where books are sold on a subscription basis, the fortunes of scholarly publishers will improve dramatically.