Scholarly

Last week at the Professional and Scholarly Publishers Conference -- an event hosted by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Professional & Scholarly Publishers (PSP) in Washington D.C. -- keynote speaker Joseph Esposito posed a question that all publishers, not just those in the professional and scholarly segments, are struggling to answer. That question…

At the dawn of digital content distribution there were many excited ideas about the possibilities of computerized information. In the 1960s, Ted Nelson and others theorized about the potential of computerized information and wrote excitedly about the possibilities of a network of interconnected digital texts. Nelson is a computer scientist and philosopher who, among other…

AMSTERDAM—January 21, 2016—A new online platform gives healthcare professionals free access to a selection of lectures from Europe’s biggest cancer conference, providing them with the latest research on a variety of cancers and treatments. The ECC Webcasts platform (eccwebcasts.ejcancer.com), run by Elsevier and hosted by the European Journal of Cancer (EJC), features webcasts of some…

January seems like the perfect time to look forward and think about what we might expect to see this coming year. Although none of the Chefs have claimed to be clairvoyant (at least not publicly), they all have slightly different views of the scholarly publishing and communications ecosystem. So this month we asked the Chefs:…

While predicting the future is fraught with peril, there seems a fairly clear consensus about where the research community would like to see things go. Our efforts these days are focused on broadening access to the research literature and research results, and toward improving their quality, through better transparency and reproducibility. Academia is a notoriously…

Richard Price always had an entrepreneurial bent. He started a cake business in his mum's kitchen during a summer break from his doctoral program at Oxford, eventually converting it into a sandwich-delivery service after realizing people only ate cake once a week. Then, when one of his philosophy papers took three years to get published,…

The underlying economic assumption of the movement for open access monographs is that provosts will pay for what librarians will not. Never mind that libraries get their funding through the provost’s office; what matters is the shell game: move the money around and somehow or other it will grow in size. And if it does…

Going mobile is more than just big pages fitting on tiny screens. Mobile requires content to be organized so that it can be quickly served up in bite-sized chunks into any of the myriad forms that users might want, because today’s consumers want their content their way, on their devices, and in their timeframes. Publishers…

When Ashgate Publishing was bought last summer by Informa, a large corporation, some academics feared for its future. What would happen to the family-owned publishing house, which had spent four decades building a reputation for social responsibility and close relationships with its authors? In November those fears started coming true. According to a Change.org petition…

According to the Association of American Publishers (AAP), July was a strong month for trade publishers. In its Monthly StatShot report, the AAP reported that sales grew .3% in the trade market from January to July 2015 -- the first increase in trade sales this year. Driving that growth were double-digit increases in adult, children/YA,…