March 4, 2024
Nathalie Ann Köbli and colleagues, writing for Frontiers in Communication on gamification of social scientists’ publishing: Quantifying publication outcomes to assess and financially incentivize research performance results in a highly competitive playing field where...
March 2, 2024
From Wiley’s press release announcing the sale of its online-program business to a one-time rival: Academic Partnerships (AP), a company that assists primarily regional public universities in expanding access and impact by supporting their online programs, today...
February 24, 2024
Greg Cram and Kathleen Riegelhaupt, on the New York Public Library’s Scholarly Press Backlist Revival Project, which seeks to pry backlist books from out-of-print inaccessibility: Since 2022, we have worked to develop a proof of concept in partnership with the...
February 21, 2024
Justin Weinberg, writing for the Daily Nous: Political Philosophy is born from the ashes of The Journal of Political Philosophy (JPP). It has some similarities with its predecessor—you’ll recognize its editors and editorial board—but also some differences. For...
February 20, 2024
Dahl Shaulis, writing for Higher Education Inquirer about 2U’s in-progress implosion: 2U, a Lanham, Maryland-based edtech company and parent company edX, is facing layoffs of an estimated 200 to 400 workers--a significant number for a company that only employs a few...
January 4, 2024
Speaking of AI, here’s Lorcan Dempsey, proposing to group Elsevier, Digital Science and Clarivate as “scholarly communication service providers”: In our space, it will be especially interesting to watch what I call the scholarly communication service providers,...
January 2, 2024
I have a post on FORCE11’s Upstream, on scholarly publishers’ in-progress play for prediction-product profit: The big publishers think they’re sitting on a gold mine. It’s not just their paywalled, full-text scholarship, but also the reams of other data they hoover up...
December 29, 2023
The latest installment of Clarke & Esposito’s The Brief newsletter is, as always, sharp and informative. The lead bit is on Google’s new Gemini, and its example AI academic search. Thanks to Google Scholar, Gemini can mine OA content at the article level, even in...
December 28, 2023
Sam Moore, concluding a thoughtful analysis of rights-retention policies in Europe an elsewhere: To be clear, very little of the negotiations around rights retention represents much more than liberal market economics—it should not be confused for the kind of political...
November 30, 2023
Roy Kaufman, CEO of the for-profit Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), posted excerpts from the company’s response to the US Copyright Office’s call for comments on AI training data. The Scholarly Kitchen post is fascinating and worthy of notice. It’s hardly surprising...
November 28, 2023
Speaking of APC revenue, Leigh-Ann Butler and colleagues have a great paper out in Quantitative Science Studies, on APC revenue from the big five commercial publishers (2015–2018): Revenue from gold OA amounted to $612.5 million, while $448.3 million was obtained for...
November 27, 2023
The just-released U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) report on OA financing is definitely interesting—it’s far more in-depth in its scope than the last year’s Nelson Memo. References to cOAlition S, diamond OA, subscribe-to-open, and other...
November 17, 2023
A coda to Tuesday’s post on SPARC’s Elsevier report. Here’s Sam Biddle, writing for The Intercept on Elsevier corporate sibling LexisNexis Risk Solutions: The popular data broker LexisNexis began selling face recognition services and personal location data to U.S....
November 14, 2023
From SPARC North America’s overview of its important new report on Elsevier’s ScienceDirect data tracking: By analyzing the privacy practices of the world’s largest publisher, the report describes how user tracking that would be unthinkable in a physical library...
November 2, 2023
On Tuesday—Halloween here in the US—cOAlition S released a new open access blueprint, one that, in effect, proposes to dismantle the prevailing journal system. Under an anodyne title (“Toward Responsible Publishing”), the group of (mostly) European state funders and...
October 30, 2023
Adam Hyde, John Chodacki, and Paul Shanon, writing on FORCE11’s Upstream on seven key roles that “AI” could play in a scholarly publishing workflow: Extract: Identify and isolate specific entities or data points within the content. Validate: Verify the accuracy and...
October 20, 2023
From Retraction Watch: An article that proposed potential benefits of private equity firms investing in autism service providers has been removed from the journal in which it was published. The author is founder and CEO of the Behavioral Health Center of Excellence...
October 17, 2023
My colleague Sue Curry Jansen and I, writing for The Hedgehog Review draft the neglected philosopher Susanne Langer as AI critic: Our modest objective here is to add a historical dimension to the critical toolkit by highlighting the work of a profoundly...
October 12, 2023
Announced in July, Springer Nature’s acquisition of protocols.io didn’t attract much attention: protocols.io will form part of Springer Nature’s expanding Solutions business which is committed to providing researchers, and their institutions, with a comprehensive...
October 10, 2023
Per Pippin, writing in LSE Impact on a Diamond Open Access Fund: Read-and-Publish deals are likely to be short lived; they were, after all, supposed to be ‘transitional deals’. The public money that has so far been spent on these deals could be better invested in this...
