The Scholarly Kitchen
Roger C. Schonfeld
How Readers Discover Content in Scholarly Publications
A new survey looks at the ways readers discover scholarly publications. Due to methodological limitations, scholarly information professionals should practice caution in interpreting the findings and considering potential business responses. Ultimately, it is impressive that the researchers have taken on such a large-scale study, which adds some additional context to our understanding of discovery, especially in its diversity. Continue reading
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
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
The Objectives and Organization of Scholarly Communications Functions in Research Libraries
Academic libraries today invest in scholarly communication in a variety of ways, pursuing an array of objectives and taking on a variety of roles. The variety of objectives that academic libraries have for scholarly communications is to some degree a reflection of the different levels of engagement and prioritization that their parent universities have on these issues. Continue reading
Dismantling the Stumbling Blocks that Impede Researcher Access to E-Resources
The user experience of working with e-journals and ebooks in an academic setting has failed to keep up with changing practices and preferences for how researchers now expect to access the scholarly literature.I called attention to some of these limitations in a presentation at the STM Association annual conference in October.The video of my talk is now available: I hope you enjoy the presentation Continue reading
Transitioning to a More Unified Platform
Combining most if not all of a publisher’s scholarly content on a single publisher platform has not always been the norm. Oxford University Press’s transition to a new platform represents not just a one-to-one platform shift but in fact a consolidation from more to fewer platforms. This is a trend worth understanding and watching. Continue reading
A Single User Account
Academics’ expectations for user experience are set not by reference to improvements relative to the past but increasingly in comparison with their experiences on consumer internet services and mobile devices. The best solution for research, teaching, and learning would be a single account for each user, controlled by that individual, and accepted portably across services and platforms. Continue reading
Block that PC! Forcing Your Organization to Engage the Mobile User Experience
Publishers and libraries do not completely understand how changing information consumption patterns, especially in the transition to mobile, should affect their product, infrastructure, and acquisitions strategies. Consider enticing or forcing your organization to engage more deeply with the mobile user experience. Continue reading
Thinking Through the Lit Review: Part 2: Repackaging the Review Article
The review article follows narrative conventions similar to other journal articles limiting its value in many types of discovery processes. Could the review article’s organization and analysis of the field be used to improve discovery in other types of research workflows? Continue reading
Thinking Through the Lit Review: Part 1: The Quest for Comprehensiveness
I have been tracking one kind of discovery – what I will call the quest for comprehensiveness – that is widespread among researchers but seems comparatively quiescent in professional discussion about supporting researcher needs. Would it be possible, I wonder, to develop a discovery tool that is designed not to find you the best items but rather to provide some assurance that you hadn’t missed something? Continue reading
Grab and Go and the Gravitational Pull of Discovery
A look at Facebook’s Instant Article initiative and what it means for discovery and for publishers. Continue reading
Maintaining Relationships with Readers as They Cross Affiliations
Researchers’ multiple and changing institutional affiliations create tangible challenges, both for the researchers themselves and for scholarly publishers as well. Continue reading
Discovery and Access in Light of the Ebola Outbreak
Several researchers recently “stumbled across” an article indicating the reasonable likelihood that Liberia would be faced with cases of Ebola. Public health officials had not acted on this known likelihood. The question is why. Continue reading
Dismantling the Stumbling Blocks that Impede Researchers’ Access to E-Resources
Content providers operate in the systems ecosystem of the licensing academic library, but they have been challenged to integrate their offerings as seamlessly into this ecosystem as would benefit researchers. To adapt, publishers need to examine not only the usability of their own platforms and how they can continue to be improved, but also how they are in practice used in scholarly research alongside other content platforms and intermediary services. As distance learning continues its inexorable growth and research practices continue to anticipate always-connected devices, it is becoming more urgent for libraries, content providers, and other intermediaries to work together to address these problems. Continue reading
Personalizing Discovery without Sacrificing Serendipity
A researcher’s core interests may be in a specific set of areas, but effective discovery also helps that researcher to stay aware of adjacent areas of interest or even potential areas of unknown interest. Personalized approaches to discovery can improve research efficiency without sacrificing serendipity. Continue reading
Data for Discovery
The benefits of personalizing discovery are already playing themselves out in the consumer space, suggesting tremendous opportunities for using data to personalize the research process. Given the scale of data needed for effective personalization, the implications of changing discovery processes will cascade through the scholarly ecosystem. 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.