The Scholarly Kitchen
Innovation
Co-opting “Official” Channels through Infrastructures for Openness
Last week, the news broke about a new service called DOAI that is designed to support open access. It is not a publishing model or a repository but rather a type of infrastructure. When a user inputs a DOI, DOAI connects the user to a freely available copy of the publication. This is the latest of … 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
A Possible Game-Changer for Open Educational Resources?
Amazon is reportedly poised to get into the open educational resources game. This could be huge, and not just for the most obvious reasons. Continue reading
SAGE, Publons and the Love-in Between Publishers and Start-ups
SAGE recently announced that it has taken a minority stake in peer review start-up Publons. Charlie Rapple asks why publishers are investing in workflow tools, and why start-ups are accepting publishers’ money. 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
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
Guest Post: Kent Anderson UPDATED — 96 Things Publishers Do (2016 Edition)
Kent Anderson returns to update his essential list of just what it is that publishers do. 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
Ask The Chefs: What Do You See On The Horizon For Scholarly Publishing In 2016?
January seems like the perfect time to look forward and think about what we might expect to see this coming year. This month we asked the Chefs what they think is on the horizon for 2016. 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
NYPL Shows Academic Libraries What “Public Domain” Means
The New York Public Library has now opened up hundreds of thousands of their digitized public-domain documents to unrestricted access and reuse, encouraging members the general public to exercise all the rights in those documents that the law gives them. Why aren’t more academic libraries doing the same thing? Continue reading
The Future of Writing: Tightening Up our Communications, From Just Not Sorry to SEO
Charlie Rapple wonders if controversial browser plug-in Just Not Sorry might have some useful tech behind its current gender-baiting application. Continue reading
Incremental Improvements Start With A/B Testing
Why do publishers and platform providers spend so little time seeking incremental improvements? 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
Improving Privacy by Rethinking Architecture
Today, we grapple with privacy issues as consumers, as citizens, and as voters. As an industry, we should be thinking about how to draw not only on policy but also on technical architecture to balance privacy and innovation. When the stars align, an entirely different architecture for the control of user data is possible. What would such a shift mean for scholarly publishing and academic libraries? Continue reading
Greetings from the Age of Abundance
A farewell to 2015, and some thoughts on why our culture has, in an age of abundance, slowed down so much. Continue reading
Dear Joe: Not-for-profit Publishers in “The Economy”
Robert Harington discusses Joe Esposito’s Scholarly Kitchen article from June 2015, entitled “The Mixed Marriage of For-profit and Not-for-Profit Publishing”, in context of his own experiences in the world of society publishing. Continue reading
Under the Microscope
A look at the winners in this year’s Nikon Small World imaging competition. 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
Virtual Reality and the Scholarly Publisher
This time, Virtual Reality is not a gimmick. This post summarises my investigations and thoughts on the possibilities for VR in the context of scholarly publishing. Plus there’s a quick primer to get you started. 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.