1. The e-Reader Industry Needs to Address e-book Content Errors
Major publishers collectively sold 250 million e-books in 2015 and a significant number of titles fail in the quality and control department. Some e-books have spelling mistakes and others have formatting issues. Unfortunately Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Google are not doing enough to empower users with the ability to report e-books who have content errors. In his post in the Good eReader Blog, Michael Kozlowski argues about the poor quality of e-books from the e-reader industry.
The blog post says (quote): "E-book proofreading is completely different. The texts themselves are simply converted digital copies of the original print versions so the sentence-by-sentence proofreading that she does with pre-print editing is assumed to be unnecessary. For e-books she’s supposed to make sure the links and page numbers all work and that the links themselves have no textual errors. Before she gets it someone goes through every page to ensure the paragraphs line up appropriately with the digital pages. To my knowledge, no one checks the text itself after the conversion"...........(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
2. The world needs One Repo
There are many, many repositories out there for scientists to store their research, and although this is great, searching for one thing across them all is not possible. Mike Taylor, in his post in the BioMed Central Blog, introduces a new project aiming to overcome this issue, The One Repo.
The blog post says (quote): We’re mopping up all the repositories that slip through the cracks. Some of them, likeSSRN, the Social Sciences Research Network, are big and important, but don’t get aggregated by existing services because they don’t provide a harvesting API. But we can handle sites like this, because we have mature tools that let us screen-scrape services that are only available as user-facing Web-sites. It turns out that many of the known IRs lack APIs: for example, more than a thousand of the repositories registered with OpenDOAR do not support the OAI-PMH protocol. The long tail is long; but it’s hugely important...........(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
3. The Network Model of Publishing
It’s easy to overlook the fact that print and digital are not simply formats but entire ecosystems as well. If print and digital did not in fact represent entire ecosystems, when digital products came along they would have just been slotted into the place that print once occupied. But we know that is not what happened. Digital media, for example, gave rise to comprehensive full-text search, which helped to restructure the environment, notes Joseph Esposito, in his post in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog.
The blog post says (quote): A network publishing model has greater nuance than a simple brand extension model. In brand extension the flagship brand is used to enter the marketplace with a family of products. In a network model the brand may not be used for certain nodes, as it could discourage some elements of the broader ecosystem from participating. How enthusiastic would the American Chemical Society be about referring its members to a service branded by the Royal Society of Chemistry? Suppressing the brand in some instances may be shrewd, as is taking a minority interest in certain properties. Not all nodes of a network must be wholly owned by the network publisher provided that each node is playing its role for the benefit of the overall network...........(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
4. 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. Although none of the Chefs have claimed to be clairvoyant (at least not publicly), they all have slightly different views of the scholarly publishing and communications ecosystem. Ann Michael, in her post in the Scholarly Kitchen Blog, discusses Chefs’ view for scholarly publishing in 2016.
The blog post says (quote): Up till now Google Scholar has been the primary discovery tool for OA and paid scholarly content. This may change with the launch of two new services: ACI, which indexes and hosts 10,000 curated scholarly blogs and 1Science, which indexes all OA peer reviewed articles wherever they are found. This new level of selective authorization and enhanced discovery may allow blogs to be recognized as part of the scholarly discourse and may elevate the use of OA articles within the academic community. At a time when the role of academic indexes been eroded by Google, it will be interesting to see the potential impact that indexes of OA content may have in raising the visibility and use of these resources...........(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
5. Lessons learned
Are textbooks obsolete? And is the structure of the academic book trade about to fall apart? In his post in The Bookseller Blog, Ron Johns shares his experience with academic book trade.
The blog post says (quote): I always told folks: "It’s better to sell books to people who have to have them", but that isn’t the case now. Information is available for free and I believe the textbook has no commercial future. Its demise has, of course, been catalysed by many sources but the beginning of the end was the extraordinary price increase in textbooks over the past five years. This caused a breakdown in trust between teaching staff and publishers and led teaching staff to question the structure of the academic trade, as well as to make their own course notes, to challenge the actual process and be super-selective in actually recommending a text that would really do its job...........(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
6. Journals and publishers setting sights on the unwary
Posted by David Matthews in the Times Higher Education Blog, the post shows an explosion in the number of so-called predatory publishers and journals in the past five years. These operate by publishing academic work with few or no checks in return for a fee.
The blog post says (quote): A study of predatory journals released last year found that a majority of academics publishing in such journals were from Asia, particularly India, while the practice was also rife in Nigeria. It also argued that the term "predatory" is misleading, because many of the academics involved are likely to be fully aware of the journal’s lack of standards, but are nevertheless happy to be published there in the hope that it will boost their careers...........(unquote)
The full entry can be read Here.
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