Scholarly

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, deciding whether to accept full-cost publishing grants that require open digital editions of long-form humanities and social sciences (HSS) monographs may prove to be the most important challenge university presses face over the next twelve months. While open access (OA) has been a feature of the scholarly publishing landscape for quite some…

The Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP) has a very good issue out now on publishing economics, which I recommend to everyone. (The issue is labelled “Volume 19, No. 1: Economics of Publishing,” a useful atavism.) There are a number of good articles here, including the very well-written introduction by the editor, Maria Bonn.  I looked…

Today education, journal, and professional publisher John Wiley & Sons released its Q1 results for the 2017 fiscal year. While the publisher experienced growth in its journal and professional development businesses, its education division saw significant revenue declines, thanks to low-performing textbooks. Wiley’s overall revenue decreased 4% from Q1 2016, declining from $423 million to…

Sometimes working in academia feels like being a gymnast at the Olympics. Not because we're tumbling through the lab in glittering costumes, but because of the constant pressure to succeed. Gymnasts are tasked to perform more spectacular routines at every competition, while scientists are expected to publish several high impact papers a year. And as…

The paradox of 21st-century science is that increasingly complex and collaborative cutting-edge research is still being written and published using 20th-century tools. The essential question—How come the internet age has yet to deliver a collaborative writing and publishing tool for research?—is what two of my physicist friends and I were thinking about several years ago…

The University of Michigan Press, like many university presses these days, is facing two realities. First, there is the perception of the press as an innovator in its field. It is recognized as one of the first to argue that university presses can better serve the needs of scholars by working with their own university…

It seems as though the role, value, and impact of social media in scholarly communications is a continuous debate. Do researchers use social media? Does social media boost citations? Are citations really all that matter? Does social media impact the reputation of publishers, authors, or the particular discipline of study? Are some disciplines more likely than…

The thesis of my talk is that university presses are not well positioned to thrive (and we’ll come back to that word) in journal publishing because they have not adopted any of the (relatively few and common) business strategies that are necessary, given market dynamics, for success. I do not put forth this thesis lightly.…

This webinar will discuss the factors affecting scholarly publishing workflows and what publishers need to know to stay ahead.

The basic paradigm scholarly publishers have been working in has shown signs of maturity for many years now. We can list these signs, or at least some of them — the flattening of library budgets, the growing involvement of regulatory agencies in the operations of publishers, the difficult challenge in introducing new content-based products —…