Publishers of subscription and open access scholarly content are facing downward pressures on pricing. Angela Cochran explores some of the hidden costs associated with a professional publishing operation and asks whether some of the tasks currently done by publishers should be absorbed elsewhere.
A major factor in determining quality in the peer review process are the reviewers. Without peers providing high-quality reviews, the value-add of the peer review process declines. We started this conversation about what makes a quality peer review within our larger community via Twitter , and came up with a few qualities of good peer reviewers.
An interview with Jason Lorgan, executive director of campus stores at @UCDavis, about the university’s innovative new textbook-affordability program.
The second of two posts on the roles of e-books in scholarly publishing, focused on how e-books fit into the mission and the business model of university presses and what that might mean for authors and readers.
Users need training in the complexities of online search. A new book by Daniel Russell from MIT Press offers solid instruction in how to think about the search process.
What roles are e-books now playing, and what roles will they play, in scholarly disciplines for which books are a primary, often the apex, scholarly form? The first of two posts about e-books and university presses.
Springer Nature is leading in the effort to preserve library subscriptions by syndicating its content and, in doing so, would establish ResearchGate as perhaps the foremost service for the distribution of scholarly content. Analysis by @lisalibrarian and @rschon.
Guest blogger Julie Zhu discusses publisher strategies and industry standards for tending to the “plumbing” of content discovery and access.
As the amount of scholarship continues to grow, Common Threads asks what new insights and utility can be found in reorganization of content for new audiences.
Judy Luther takes an in-depth look at Unizin, a consortial effort by universities to build open source digital learning systems.
Does Springer Nature’s first machine-generated book usher in a new era of authorship? Or readership? Are the robots writing?
ACRL’s latest report identifies needed areas of research to help foster a more open, inclusive and equitable scholarly communications system.
The latest report from SPARC is a departure from advocacy and is very well done. Robert Harington discusses key findings from Claudio Aspesi et al., for SPARC – A Landscape Analysis: The Changing Academic Publishing Industry – Implications for Academic Institutions
Despite the near consensus about the popularity (or lack thereof) of commenting on academic articles, there is surprisingly little publicly available data relating to commenting rates. To address this, a team of academics from the Universities of Sheffield and Loughborough have recently published research into article commenting on PLOS journals. Simon Wakeling, Stephen Pinfield and Peter Willett report here on their findings.
An awareness of how neurodiverse people in academia and scholarly publishing perceive the world can improve working relationships and help them achieve their potential.