The Scholarly Kitchen
Joseph Esposito
Winning Strategies for Journal Publishers
Although we in scholarly publishing typically focus on the problems we face, there is a small group of highly successful journal publishers. These publishers fall into three broad categories. To a great extent, these publishers are resistant to challenge. Continue reading
Sci-Hub and the Four Horsemen of the Internet
Sci-Hub sets a reprehensible example, but publishers cannot be content simply to stamp out such services. In order to evolve the industry into the future, publishers have to provide services that make Sci-Hub and its ilk seem old-fashioned and inconvenient to use. Continue reading
The Illicit Love Affair between Open Access and Traditional Publishing
At the recent PSP conference there was a panel on the cost of complying with the many new open access mandates from funding bodies. The panel explored the cost of compliance and how to reduce those costs. The current regulatory regime is complicated and administratively expensive, but the mandates will continue to be promulgated because the people calling for them are not the ones that have to implement them. Continue reading
Revisiting: When Is a Feature a Product, and a Product a Business?
Revisiting Joe Esposito’s post on distinguishing between features, products, and businesses. Not all features can become full-fledged businesses. Sometimes the best business case for a feature is to link it to an established business, where it adds value to assets that are already in place. Continue reading
An Interview with Jeffrey Beall
An interview with librarian and open access skeptic Jeffrey Beall. He discusses his work, the criteria for declaring an organization a “predatory publisher,” and how he would fix the scholarly communications system. Continue reading
Bulwarks, Agility, and Foresight
[Editor’s note: This is the edited text of a presentation that Joe Esposito gave as a keynote at the PSP conference in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 3, 2016. The slides for the presentation are embedded at the end of the text. Joe would like to thank John Tagler and Sara Pinto of PSP for their assistance … Continue reading
The Open Syllabus Project, Altmetrics, and a New Dataset
The Open Syllabus Project has created a database of over 1 million college syllabuses and extracted the names of the materials used in these courses. These materials are analyzed quantitatively and ranked. The creators of the service propose a new metric for the evaluation of academic publications. Continue reading
The Network Model of Publishing
One of the unanticipated consequences of the introduction of digital media to scholarly publishing is that publishing properties increasingly are organized into networks, with one property pointing to another for the benefit of all. This essay describes the network publishing model and comments on some of a network’s characteristics and economic opportunities. Continue reading
The Terrible Burden of a Prestigious Brand
While all publishers like to have a strong brand, some brands are so prestigious that they actually serve to paralyze the managements responsible for them, making it impossible to introduce innovations and to develop the business. Vast bureaucracies arrive whose purpose is not to develop the business but to protect the vaunted brand. This is a management problem, not a marketing one, but it can stymie a publisher from pursuing a progressive agenda. Continue reading
Mr. Market is a Brilliant Editor
Of the many ways to measure the quality of a publication, one that is often overlooked are the workings of the marketplace itself. Purchases for published material is made in large part on the basis of the quality of that material, making the marketplace something of an editor of genius. This mechanism incorporates all other metrics, from impact factor to altmetrics. Unfortunately, the marketplace is not free to exercise its judgment when many participants seek dominant and even monopolistic control. Continue reading
For Open Access Monographs, Peter Pays Paul. Who Pays Peter?
Gold open access for monographs is based on the notion that provosts will pay for what librarians will not. This seems like an improbable model for scholarly publishing. Publishing that is not based on end-user demand is not likely to have strong support in lean times. Continue reading
Revisiting: Governance and the Not-for-profit Publisher
Revisiting Joe Esposito’s classic post on how the governance of not-for-profit publishing entities plays a large role in those entities’ success or failure. Continue reading
MOOCs Rise from the Ashes
The MOOCs seem to have faded from view. In large part this is because they were so relentlessly overhyped when they first appeared. But now various forms of online education have begun to get traction in the marketplace. An essay by Clay Shirky points out how online education is operating today and its implications for higher education. Continue reading
People Make the Difference: Steering a Start-up to Success
A panel at the Charleston conference featured three CEOs of start-ups, who shared their experiences in creating and running a completely new organization. All of these companies are computationally sophisticated, so advanced technologically that it is hard to image established companies taking on their challenges. Another common theme is the importance of hiring and retaining the very best people, a matter in which start-up CEOs tend to be obsessive. Continue reading
Notes on Publishing in an Emerging Economy
Well-intended government policy in an Eastern European nation is having unexpected results on school publishing, some of which are the precise opposite of what policymakers had hoped for. The problem is that those who draft policy have little imagination about how new programs will be taken up–and altered–in the marketplace. Continue reading
Return of the Big Brands: How Legacy Publishers Will Coopt Open Access
Open access publishing has gone through a number of stages. Though different people will classify these stages in diverse ways, one way to view this is to say that since the initial period of advocacy for open access, commercial interests have entered this market and are now prepared to augment their positions by leveraging their elite brands, using them, as it were, to draw manuscripts for a family of cascading products. Continue reading
Libraries and Consortia in the Context of a Publisher’s Strategy
Professional societies are facing growing resistance to place their publications in libraries. This results in these societies seeking arrangements with the largest commercial publishers, whose sway with libraries and especially library consortia is significant. Libraries have demonstrated a clear preference to work with the larger publishers over the smaller ones. This leads to increasing concentration and market power in the academic publishing industry. Continue reading
What Is “Publishing” if Even a Library Can Do It?
Libraries increasingly provide a wide range of publishing activities, but are there some areas where libraries are not active? It appears that libraries are unlikely to play a large role in publishing that is based on end-user demand. Continue reading
Looking to the Future of Narrative
The novelist Iain Pears has produce a book on an interactive app, noting that his work had come up against the limitations of the printed page. What are the implications of experiments in narrative form for other kinds of publishing? Continue reading
Amazon and the Future of Work
Amazon was recently criticized harshly in an article in the New York Times. The piece raises the question of whether the hard-charging culture of the tech industry is what we want. Continue reading
Authors
The mission of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) is "[t]o advance scholarly publishing and communication, and the professional development of its members through education, collaboration, and networking." SSP established The Scholarly Kitchen blog in February 2008 to keep SSP members and interested parties aware of new developments in publishing.
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The Scholarly Kitchen is a moderated and independent blog. Opinions on The Scholarly Kitchen are those of the authors. They are not necessarily those held by the Society for Scholarly Publishing nor by their respective employers.