Scholarly

This year I was asked to moderate a panel for Society Day at the annual STM Association conference. We put together a highly informative panel: Angela Cochran, Journal Director for the American Society of Civil Engineers; Edith Holmes, Executive Director, JOSPT (Journal of Orthopaedics and Sports Physical Therapy); and David Gammel, Executive Director, Entomological Society…

If you want to read an article from the Journal of Financial Economics, and you don't have a subscription or access to a library that does, publisher Elsevier will charge you $39.95. For one article! Don't despair, though. You can also just go to the Social Science Research Network, where drafts -- in some cases…

We often see discussions of scholarly publishing framed with familiar terminology — commercial vs. non-profit; subscription vs. open access; glamour vs. non-glamour; specialty vs. general; high-impact vs. low-impact. Using these frameworks, it’s difficult to see why publishing wouldn’t change quickly and easily, with just a few adjustments, the proper financial incentives aimed at these simple distinctions, and…

Altmetrics (a non-traditional assessment of citation-impact metrics in scholarly publishing) have passed their fifth birthday. While there are debates taking place about important issues (the potential gaming of altmetrics, how to weight the various events, etc.), they are helping to engage readers and drive article downloads. Who hasn’t found themselves clicking on a most shared/commented…

Over the last decade there has been a quiet revolution in the way academic institutions track and manage their research activity. “Universities have moved from having multiple systems for single purposes, to also having a single system for multiple purposes”, explains Bo Alroe, director, sales enablement for Elsevier’s Pure software. Now used by over 200…

Alexandra Elbakyan is a 27 year old graduate student exploring the history of science. She’s also making that history herself, as the creator and administrator of Sci-Hub.org, a searchable database of tens of millions of scholarly articles. The articles are from a huge variety of disciplines, and they’re free to access, making them a treasure…

Discovery patterns and practices are changing steadily, as workflows adjust to new services and work around a variety of barriers. The best data about discovery practices are held by content providers, who are able to analyze the variety of sources that researchers use to reach their platforms. But while many content providers analyze their own…

Scholarly publishing, like any industry or profession is subject to interpretation, from within, from without, from adjacent industries and from random people walking down the street. As the discourse surrounding scholarly publishing increases, we thought it would be informative to Ask The Chefs: What is the biggest misconception…

Springer Nature is to expand its nature.com content sharing initiative to its entire journals portfolio. The initiative, which originally saw articles from 47 subscription journals made freely shareable between subscribers and non–subscribers around the world for personal, non-commercial use, as well to certain media outlets, was extended indefinitely in December following a year-long pilot which…

The University Press Redux Conference, held March 16 and 17 in Liverpool, was billed as the first to focus on university presses in a specifically UK context, but had plenty of representation from—and relevance to—scholarly publishing in the States. Members of nine American university presses joined their European counterparts to exchange insights into the rapidly…