1. How Much Does Publishing Cost?
There have been several recent studies of what it costs to publish academic monographs, but they all mistake the cost of production with cost of publication. In his post in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog, Joseph Esposito summarizes the issues and suggests a very simple way to calculate the cost of publication.
The blog post says (quote): Whenever someone talks about the cost of publishing, the conversation seems to me to take place in a vacuum. Step inside a publishing company and ask this question: Where is the greatest amount of energy expended? The answer is in finding the best authors. Publishing, in other words, is about the relentless pursuit of the best content for a particular program, and the best content comes from the small number of people who can create it. Publishing is brutally competitive, but the competition takes place not so much downstream in sales and marketing but upstream, where editors step into the ring every day, determined to knock out their rivals.……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
2. Guest Post: INASP's Jonathan Harle on Why Publishers Need to Pay Attention to the UN's Sustainable Development Goals
When the United Nations issues a declaration detailing a new global development agenda for the next 15 years, it probably doesn't create many ripples in the publishing industry. But their new Sustainable Development Goals - also known as Global Goals - should make us sit up and think. Posted by INASP’s Jon Harle in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog, this post looks at the United Nation's Global Goals and explains why they matter to publishers.
The blog post says (quote): Goal 17 commits the world to a global partnership for development. It recognises that we won't realise any of these goals unless we bring organisations together, across sectors, and in new and creative ways. This means working across government, the private sector, and civil society, recognising that each has a role to play in solving some of development's difficult problems. Goal 17 has another important message, which also matters for the quality of these partnerships and the approach we take as external actors: we need to respect each country's policy space and leadership. We believe this is important in the research and publishing system too.……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
3. 'Fishing out' the missing elements in a publication
Posted by Sheevendra Sharma in the BioMed Central Blog, this post discusses how scientific publications are often measured solely by their end result, missing the important contributions that come before this and introduces Profeza, a platform they co-founded with the intention of changing this dynamic. Profeza.com aims to bring a paradigm shift to the way scholarly articles are communicated and the way scholars’ credits are associated with them.
The blog post says (quote): There are two basic approaches to research – quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative pertains to the number of publications that a researcher achieves during his early career, and qualitative refers to the place where each publication appears. The definition of research is subjective but the process and functionality are the same. In case of students who write a thesis/dissertation, it’s the way to attain a high position in the social structure. For philosophers and thinkers, research is the channel for new ideas and insights. Analysts and intellectuals look to research for the development of new theories.……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
4. How are you connecting with your customers?
The people who actually buy and read books are still mostly nameless and faceless individuals from a publisher’s point of view. This, despite the fact that there are plenty of opportunities for publishers to establish a direct relationship with consumers. In his post in the Digital Content Strategies Blog, Joe Wikert discusses about the opportunity to build a relationship with the people who open their wallets every day for your products.
The blog post says (quote): The author mentioned "early access to new titles". What does that mean? He is suggesting that publishers offer samples of new publications exclusively on their website or via email through free membership programs. Amazon typically doesn't offer the ebook or e-sample till the print book publishes. Why not take advantage of the period between when the sample is ready and the book is released to encourage consumers to join your membership program or visit your site? And if you do this, be sure to remove all DRM from those samples; after all, the goal is to encourage sharing of that content, not lock it down.……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
5. A whistle-stop tour of Open Access in China
Open Access is not a research issue. It's not a European issue. It's not a publisher or policy issue. Open Access is a global issue, notes Jon Tennant, in his post in the ScienceOpen Blog.
The blog post says (quote): Almost all major funding bodies allow the use of research grants to fund the article-processing charges often required for OA, and there is moderate support often with 50 percent of APCs being accounted for directly from the funders. The result of this has been an increase in the number of OA papers by Chinese authors, including almost 10,000 in PLOS from January 2010-October 2013. SCOAP3 also has a working group in China that has been helping to transform one of the major Chinese publishers, Higher Education Press, into a full OA model. As of 2013, there were 87 institutional repositories functioning in China, achieving more than 6.3 million downloads between 2010 and 2013. More than 75 percent of articles here were full text open access, representing half a million articles in 2013.……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
6. Open access 'boosts citations by a fifth'
Open access papers attract up to a fifth more citations than those locked away in closed journals, a new study has found. In his post in the Times Higher Education Blog, David Matthews looks at what happened when a university made its publications publicly available through an institutional repository.
The blog post says (quote): Previous studies that attempted to determine whether an open access citation advantage exists have been dogged by the difficulty of finding comparable samples of open-access and subscription-only articles. For example, it could be that authors select only their best articles to be made public in an otherwise closed journal by paying an article processing charge, meaning they get more citations regardless of the publishing format. The study got around this problem by looking at the citation rates of thousands of articles after they had been made public through Michigan’s repository over the past decade. This meant that Ottaviani had a relatively random sample of nearly 4,000 open access papers across a range of otherwise subscription-only journals.……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
7. 15 types of data to collect when assessing your digital library
Millions of dollars per year are poured into building digital library technology: digitising content and creating the open source infrastructure that supports countless researchers. But surprisingly, not much is known about how digital library collections are actually being used! In her post in the Altmetric Blog, Stacy Konkiel shares some expert recommendations for the best quantitative and qualitative data to collect in the digital library assessment efforts, as well as tools that can be used to streamline data collection.
The blog post says (quote): Requests for hi-resolution digital library content, submitted via automated means, could be an indicator of later citations or reuse and adaptations. Further study is needed. Citations help us understand the use of our digital libraries in a scholarly context, particularly when cited in books and journal articles. Citations to digital library content can be difficult to uncover, however. Visitor demographic information is another metric of interest to libraries. Demographic information like age and user interests can be sourced from third-party services like Facebook or Google (which are sometimes used to allow visitors to login to library websites), from IP addresses that help determine users’ location, or even from library-administered surveys. There are obvious privacy implications to tracking visitors’ demographic information.……………(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
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