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Michael Eisen writes:
'Why, you might ask, would Carolyn Maloney, representing a liberal Democratic district in New York City that is home to many research institutions, sponsor such a reactionary piece of legislation that benefits a group of wealthy publishers at the expense of the American public? Hmm. Wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with the fact that she’s the biggest recipient of campaign contributions from the publishing industry, would it?
According to MapLight, which tracks political contributions, Dutch publisher Elsevier and its senior executives made 31 contributions to members of the House in 2011, of which 12 went to Representative Maloney. This includes contributions from 11 senior executives or partners, only one of whom is a resident of her district.'
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Andrew Spong shared this post on Twitter. (January 6, 6:57 AM) |
Publishing
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Try as I might, I see neither the logic in nor any compelling reason to believe that Waterstones will 'make the Kindle experience better' (00:38) for me.
I have a Kindle.
I buy books via the Kindle store. At home. Waiting for a train. In bed. Wherever.
Never, however, in Waterstones.
Bizarre.
Also, I drawing a veil over how we got from Amazon being a 'a ruthless, money-making devil' in Waterstone's opinion to their becoming a partner of choice. Clearly, there's no logic here -- merely financial expediency.
That said, there appears to be little logic to the endgame of highstreet bookselling in general. Desperate times, desperate measures -- same conclusion. 
An official at the European Commission, which is drafting proposals for the Horizon 2020 program, said that for researchers receiving funding from its program between 2014 and 2020, open-access publishing "will be the norm." A pilot under way in seven areas of its current funding program will be extended to become a mandate across all peer-reviewed research in the new scheme, which will cover fields ranging from particle physics to social science. 
Jessica P. Hekman writes:
"The prestige problem has plagued open access from the start[...] So how to put power back in their hands?
By actually moving the prestige to open access. A big name endorsement of a journal article doesn’t have to come from publication in a big name journal. It can come from faculty at a big name university.
I propose that Harvard faculty members organize to volunteer their editorial services in identifying and recommending the best new open access articles in their field, after those articles have been published. Get the publications out there, decide if they’re important later. Yes, this is post publication peer review, which has been suggested before, but it involves the same peers as our current system of pre publication peer review."
[AS: Great post, great idea, and another excellent reason to move from filter>publish to publish>filter scholarly publishing] 
"As you can imagine, when library budgets are flat and journal prices are going up by 9-10% per year,cancellations (of journal subscriptions) are the inevitable result," said Rick Anderson, acting dean of the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah.
Anderson estimates that BYU, the U. and USU, Utah's three big research schools, collectively spend about $20 million each year on academic journals. The cost is millions more when the rest of the state's schools are costs are added. 
The UK plans to give the public access to academic research via the internet free of charge. The government said that Wikipedia's co-founder Jimmy Wales had agreed to advise it on how to ensure the move would promote "collaboration and engagement". The decision will have major implications for the publishing industry. 
Martin Fenner (@mfenner) writes:
'Starting May 16 I will be working full-time as technical lead for the PLoS Article Level Metrics (ALM) project. I will help with development of the PLoS ALM application, and will do community developer outreach for this project.'
[AS: On a personal note, I couldn't be more delighted that Martin will be steering this vital project. Martin is well known for the intelligent, informed contributions he has made to discussions around OA and the evolution of scholarly publishing, and his support for #hcsmeu since its inception in 2009 has also been appreciated by its membership.] 
The aim of academic journals is to make the best research widely available. Many have ended up doing the opposite. It is time that changed. 
Wellcome backs campaign to break stranglehold of academic journals and allow all research papers to be shared free online. 
The figures show strong growth in digital revenues for publishers across the board, but with near-flat growth overall and digital as a percentage of total sales averaging only 17% among the publishers surveyed, total revenues are clearly going to be challenged. 
'In his new position, Cameron Neylon (@CameronNeylon) will promote advocacy of Open Access and develop strategies to drive the broader reinvention of research communication, both within the existing PLoS journals and beyond.
He will work with other Open Access advocates, funders, publishers and scholarly societies to raise awareness and promote the adoption of research communication systems that support the public’s access and contribution to research.' 
Michael P. Taylor writes:
'By any objective standard, academic publishing is a very strange business indeed. It became established at a time when all publishing was on paper, when duplication and delivery were demanding problems, and when publishers provided an important service to researchers.
Now, as the Internet is dramatically changing other forms of publishing, academic journals seem stuck in the 1980s, with results both comical and disastrous.' 
'Begin the entry in the works-cited list with the author’s real name and, in parentheses, user name, if both are known and they differ. If only the user name is known, give it alone.
Next provide the entire text of the tweet in quotation marks, without changing the capitalization. Conclude the entry with the date and time of the message and the medium of publication (Tweet). For example:
Athar, Sohaib (ReallyVirtual). “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).” 1 May 2011, 3:58 p.m. Tweet.
The date and time of a message on Twitter reflect the reader’s time zone. Readers in different time zones see different times and, possibly, dates on the same tweet. The date and time that were in effect for the writer of the tweet when it was transmitted are normally not known. Thus, the date and time displayed on Twitter are only approximate guides to the timing of a tweet. However, they allow a researcher to precisely compare the timing of tweets as long as the tweets are all read in a single time zone.
In the main text of the paper, a tweet is cited in its entirety (6.4.1):
Sohaib Athar noted that the presence of a helicopter at that hour was “a rare event.”
or
The presence of a helicopter at that hour was “a rare event” (Athar).' 
Professor Timothy Gowers of the University of Cambridge has gathered a small army of the world's top researchers to boycott Reed Elsevier, the world's biggest publisher of academic journals, and investors had better take note.
[AS: The Indie catches up as thecostofknowledge.org declaration withdrawing their services from Elsevier jounrals approaches a staggering 8,000 academic signatories.] |
The wording of the petition in full:
"WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO:
We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.
The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research." While David Willetts, the U.K. Minister of State for Universities and Science, indicated that the government still does not have all aspects of an implementation plan in place, he outlined two activities already under development:
1) An independent working group, The Working Group on Expanding Access, chaired by Dame Judy Finch, was commissioned in 2011 and is “examining key issues of principle and practice that would be involved in increasing access to published outputs via the routes of, respectively, (i) greater take-up of open-access publishing, (ii) open-access repositories and (iii) development of national licensing.” The Working Group is expected to report its findings this spring, and it will serve as the foundation for further next steps.
2) Funding is already in place for the development of a U.K. “Gateway to Research” (GTR) web-based portal that will “enable greater public access to Research-Council funded research information and simplify networking between researchers and SMEs.” It is scheduled for launch in 2013. 
Academic publishing for the Web age. Open access and Peer-reviewed. Starting at $99 for life. 
One of the great outrages of academia in the modern age is the privatisation of the profits accruing to publicly-financed knowledge. 
As more than 10,000 scientists pledge to boycott Elsevier on the Cost of Knowledge website, its creator Tyler Neylon looks to the future. 
Bertalan Meskó, MD (@berci) writes:
Did you know that authors of scholarly articles can now create Google Scholar profiles and receive citation reports automatically? 
Jonathan Berr writes:
Amazon.com is slashing e-book prices just as publishers are facing a federal probe into price fixing, a move that is great news for voracious readers, though it places the content creators in a tough spot.
Publishing industry executives allegedly thought that by working together with Apple they would counter Amazon's growing clout. Unfortunately, that foolish decision has made Amazon even more powerful and will wind up costing publishers big money.
[AS: choosing between the option to die sooner or die later, the Big 6 have chosen the former.] 
Alok Jha reports on how a Cambridge mathematician's protest has led to demands for open access to scientific knowledge 
Daniel Mietchen writes:
'Today saw an important step forward towards a wikification of scholarly workflows: PLoS Computational Biology published an article that did not only follow the journal’s own author guidelines but also those for writing articles on the English Wikipedia, where a copy of the journal article has been pasted into [[Circular Permutation in Proteins]], where it shall live on in the hands of the wiki community.' 
Well-meaning, urbane publishing folk celebrate the evolution of the 'ebook' and the adjacent issues that vex them as they endeavour to protect their business models whilst simultaneously, and not unwittingly, chronicling the death of their industry in its current form.
[AS: I very much enjoyed this, but took particular delight in the the tweeted comment of a live listener who remarked 'talk about the concept of DRM to anyone under 20 and they'll laugh their arse off' (17:20).
The rest is window dressing, really, but stylishly presented nevertheless.
I've every hope that this series won't get too wistful about the passing of yesterday, but choose instead to celebrate the possibilities today is offering rather more vigorously. It's the last party for those publishers who haven't evolved quickly enough and/or can't shake off the burden of vestigial business models, so they may as well enjoy themselves. By dint of their having taken part, everyone involved in this enterprise is manifesting the fact that they're savvy enough to make the cut when the axe swings. Good luck to them.] 
Anindita Mukherjee considers the long term impact that the taking down of Library.nu may have upon the scholarly publishers that lobbied for it:
'Library.nu, for innumerable users, was a source of otherwise inaccessible research material. The claim of publishing houses that this e-book piracy was leading to mammoth losses is, therefore, questionable. Shutting library.nu only makes a huge mass of research inaccessible to a global audience.
Given the nature of the Internet, the publisher coalition seems to be set on fighting a losing battle. The angry buzz in colleges is quickly being replaced with the name of a newly-discovered treasure trove of free knowledge.' 
'Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes is purchasing the New Republic, the nearly century-old political magazine known for its influence in progressive circles, according to The New York Times.
Hughes, who will assume the title "editor-in-chief," told The Times that he would place particular emphasis on tablet computers, such as the iPad: [Hughes] focus, he said in an interview in advance of the announcement, will be on distributing the magazine’s long-form journalism through tablet computers like the iPad. Though he does not intend to end the printed publication, “five to 10 years from now, if not sooner, the vast majority of The New Republic readers are likely to be reading it on a tablet,” he said.' |
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