Measuring the Success of Transformative Agreements
I asked twelve publisher/customer pairs how they will measure the success of their transformative deals five years from now. The responses were very interesting.
Making a Plan When Planning Is Impossible
Travel bans, office closures, and conference cancellations have publishers and societies thinking about how best to ensure that scholarly content continues to be reviewed and distributed. This post by Angela Cochran looks at some of the impacts and questions whether this is the new normal.
Guest Post — Report: Gender Diversity in Research is Improving, But We Still Have Work To Do
Bamini Jayabalasingham, Ylann Schemm, and Holly J. Falk-Krzesinski present the takeaways of a new report by Elsevier, “The Researcher Journey Through a Gender Lens”.
Subscribe to Open: A Mutual Assurance Approach to Open Access
As the success of Subscribe to Open grows, what are the benefits and limitations of the model?
Ritual, Process, and Social Interaction: The World’s Oldest Surviving Video Rental Store
A visit to the world’s longest running video rental store and a lesson about the value of inconvenience.
Is it Finally the Year of Research Data? – The STM Association Thinks So
On February 26th, Phill Jones gate-crashed the 2nd STM association research data workshop. Here’s what he learned about the progress being made and that challenges ahead in making data sharable, open, and maybe even FAIR.
Guest Post — Open Peer Review in the Humanities
Open peer review hasn’t caught on in the humanities, but it has been part of ongoing experiments in humanities publishing. As the American Historical Review tries open review, what lessons can we take from previous experiments?
Guest Post — How China’s New Policy May Change Researchers’ Publishing Behavior
Dr. Jie Xu from the Wuhan University of China offers a view of how Chinese researchers are reacting and are likely to alter their behavior in response to new policies governing research evaluation.
Humans are the Loop: Social Solutions to Technological Challenges
From Siri to autonomous vehicles, the magic of tech innovations are wrought by human ingenuity — and setting boundaries around these technologies is a social enterprise, with inherently cultural implications.
Every Pop Melody Possible is Now in the Public Domain
What if you used a computer to generate every possible song and then put it in the public domain? Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin did just that.
New Chinese Policy Could Reshape Global STM Publishing
A new set of policies mark an effort to largely reform the research and higher education evaluation systems in China. The potential impact on the STM publishing sector is examined.
Guest Post — An Open Agenda: European Funder Approaches to Open Science
Rob Johnson of Research Consulting and Vanessa Proudman of SPARC Europe look at a recent survey of of European funders to explore what’s being done to drive change in scholarly communication, and argue that funders’ open policies could be backed up more by funders’ own practices.
Will the Future of Scholarly Communication Be Pluralistic and Democratic, or Monocultural and Authoritarian?
One way or another, the #scholcomm community is going to choose either a diversity of publishing models or a monoculture, because it can’t have both. How will this choice be made, and by whom?
“Recenter Library Systems on the User”: An Interview with OhioLINK’s Gwen Evans
The major US library consortium OhioLINK has created a vision for the systems that libraries use for acquiring content from publishers, managing collections, and enabling discovery. An interview about this vision with executive director Gwen Evans,
The “Pure Publish” Agreement
Pure publish contracts are possible now. It is not necessary to wait for the subscription publishers to change their business model or to pair a pure publish component with a read and publish component in a transformative agreement. @lisalibrarian