Professional & Academic Publishing
1
Anyone who spends any time in the world of academic and professional publishing hears a lot about how peer review is “broken.” Such claims are often followed by recipes for “fixes,” which range from the modest (double-blind review), to the unrealistic (investigating authors for undeclared conflicts of interest), to the extreme (replacing journals with preprints). But these claims are typically opinions (or sales pitches) based on anecdote and generalization. And so when the American Society of Hematology (ASH) approached us about conducting a broad survey gauging peer review attitudes and perspectives across the hematology community, we were enthusiastic.
Working closely with ASH and the independent research firm Readex, we developed a survey instrument and invited just over 25,000 individuals to participate. We received responses back from 8%, or 1,944 researchers. Although this research focused on one specific field (hematology), many elements may be generalizable to other medical specialties, as well as to STM publishing more generally.
What researchers told us was illuminating. Far from a “broken” system, we found that researchers overwhelmingly hold positive views regarding journal peer review and consider it an essential and helpful aspect of scientific communication. 80% of respondents agreed with the statement “Scientific communication is greatly helped by peer review.” 88% disagreed with the statement “Peer review is unnecessary.” Asked how peer review improves the science of papers, respondents agreed that peer review resulted in “major points [made] more clear” (69%), “data presentation improved” (66%), “overstatement corrected” (64%), and “scientific errors identified” (59%). Only 10% of respondents indicated dissatisfaction with the peer review process used by journals in their field.
Respondents also affirmed a preference for selective journals, strongly agreeing that a function of peer review should be to determine originality (88%) and importance (81%)—a view at odds with the proliferation of “sound science” peer review journals and with the vision for scholarly communication exposed by Plan S.
When asked about peer review at different stages in the scientific communication process, journal-based peer review clearly remains the gold standard. When asked “To what extent do you agree that peer review at the following stages improves the quality of papers,” 82% of respondents answered affirmatively with regard to journals as compared with 42% for preprints and 40% for post-publication comments.
That said, while researchers greatly value journal peer review, they indicated there is room for improvement. Respondents highlighted a few areas where peer review is falling short. While 82% of respondents said that peer review should detect fraud, only 35% said peer review was actually good at doing this. Similarly, whereas 72% of respondents indicated that peer review should catch plagiarism, only 35% said this was presently happening effectively.
A surprising finding was the degree to which respondents were open to changes to standard peer review processes. 76% of respondents indicated a preference for double-blind peer review, as compared with only 34% for single-blind review, which remains far more common. There was also strong support (75%) for more collaborative processes whereby the editor discusses the paper with reviewers and comes to some degree of consensus before sharing reviews with the author. Support for making peer review reports public was less strong (42% for vs 27% against), but given how few journals make peer review reports public, this level of support was still a surprising finding.
The report will soon be widely available. In the meantime, ASH has agreed to provide subscribers of The Brief with a sneak preview of the study, which you can download here (PDF).
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Source: American Society of Hematology, Clarke & Esposito
2
Speaking of preprints, a study just published in eLife quantifies the uptake of bioRxiv. It shows that growth has been strong, with over 100,000 preprints posted in 2018 and over 1.1 million downloads in the month of October 2018 alone. The paper is useful in providing more granularity into which fields are represented in bioRxiv (neuroscience and bioinformatics are popular; clinical trials not so much) and also in watching where these papers end up being published. Topping the list is, unsurprisingly, Scientific Reports (the largest journal in the world as measured by papers published in 2018). Interestingly, eLife itself came in second, publishing more papers posted as preprints than much larger journals such as PLOS ONE, Nature Communications, and PNAS). Perhaps the most important finding from the study is that approximately two-thirds (67%) of preprints posted to bioRxiv before 2017 were later published in peer-reviewed journals. The study authors note that this is likely a conservative number as it relied on bioRxiv’s own data to match preprints to articles published in journals. In conducting a manual search on Google Scholar related to a sample of 120 preprints for which bioRxiv did not report matching journal articles, the authors found 37.5% of the sample actually did have matches. Which is all to say that bioRxiv does not seem to be supplanting journal publication as some have feared (and others have championed); instead it is following closely in the footstep of is older sibling, arXiv, which has a journal publication rate of 73%.
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Source: eLife
3
SPARC has just released a landscape analysis of the scholarly publishing industry. Given SPARC’s position as an open access advocacy organization, we opened the report expecting a report colored by a strong point of view. We were pleasantly surprised to find ourselves reading a clear-eyed and insightful analysis, no doubt a result of the admirable selection of Claudio Aspesi as lead author. Aspesi brings an impressive resume as a noted market analyst, executive, and former McKinsey consultant. The impetus for the report is to analyze the implications for institutions of the expansion of a handful of publishers beyond traditional publications to “research assessment systems, productivity tools, [and] online learning management systems.” As such, the report focuses primarily on the publishers offering (or developing) such products and services. These include Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley, and Clarivate. The report provides an overview of the market, a cogent description of the market position and strategy of each organization, and how the competitive environment is shaping each publisher’s actions and options. One astute observation, for example, is provided on the impact of last year’s failed Springer Nature IPO on Elsevier:
Elsevier is the net winner from the IPO’s failure. Had the IPO succeeded, Springer Nature would have had less debt, more flexibility to pursue growth through investments, and it could have also created an uncomfortable peer in the eyes of investors: a low valuation of Springer Nature would have raised questions on the valuation of RELX Group.
A particularly interesting bit of data can be found on page 25, where the report lays out the revenue per article of Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer Nature. Contrary to what one would think by way it is battered in the press and on social media, Elsevier actually has the lowest revenue per article of this cohort ($4,089 compared to $4,386 for Springer Nature and $5,431 for Wiley).
The second half of the report is focused on the academic textbook market, and highlights McGraw-Hill Education, Pearson, and Cengage. Of course, even though this report was just released, events have already conspired to overtake it, with McGraw-Hill Education and Cengage announcing their intention to merge (see Item 12 below). Nonetheless, the report provides a helpful primer on the textbook market and the challenges faced by both publishers and universities in managing a transition to digital education formats.
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Source: SPARC
4
The Chinese Chemical Society (CCS) is launching a new flagship English-language journal titled CCS Chemistry. This is the first noteworthy English-language journal to be published by a Chinese society and as such marks an arrival of sorts on the international publishing stage. While China has rapidly become a research powerhouse, producing more research papers annually than any other country, the vast majority of these papers are published in Western journals. CSS Chemistry marks the debut of China as an international publisher (China, of course, has a long history of publishing Chinese-language scholarly journals). The publishing model, according to an editorial in the inaugural issue, will be Diamond OA (free to publish, free to read), which is likely to draw some manuscripts that are currently being submitted to the many chemistry journals based in North America and Europe.
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Source: CSS Chemistry
5
As noted last month, just as The Brief was going to press the University of California and Cambridge University Press announced they had come to terms on a Read and Publish agreement—the first for U. Cal. Few details were available at the time but since then Mandy Hill (CUP’s Managing Director) and Chris Bennett (CUP’s Global Sales Director) sat down to chat with our colleague Roger Schonfeld at Ithaka S+R about the new agreement. We were particularly struck by CUP’s stated commitment to a transformative strategy in light of their clear-eyed acknowledgment that in an OA world research universities will need to pay much more—something many are not prepared to do:
In a shift to pay-to-publish from pay-to-read we anticipate that there will be a smaller customer base (the more research intensive universities for example). So if those customers who want to convert can’t pay much more and there are fewer customers, it stands to reason that we will see a like-for-like revenue decline globally. This is a problem for us as we don’t have huge profit margins to play with but we are confident that we can not only make this work through this short term transition, but find ways to grow again from this new base.
CUP appears to be preparing for a diminution of its revenues related to its existing portfolio but is confident that on a ten-year horizon it can recover via the development of new products and services:
We are modelling a ten-year horizon which does see significant revenue impact to traditional subscription revenues in the mid-term, followed by recovery through the positive impact of investments in content, technology, further publishing services and brand-new models, which we expect to generate brand-new business.
Given that these new products and services are not yet developed (and may not even yet be identified), this is a remarkable strategy—one that is all the more remarkable given that nearly two-thirds of the journals published by CUP are owned by learned societies. We wonder whether all of these societies have fully digested and embraced a strategy that will result in a “significant revenue impact” especially as it is unclear (to us anyway) whether the societies will benefit financially from the new products and services that CUP will be developing in the future.
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Source: The Scholarly Kitchen
6
Last month in The Brief we also reported that Norway’s Unit consortium had announced that it did not intend to renew its agreement with Elsevier. Since then, the two organizations have come to terms, announcing a new national license covering Unit’s 7 universities and 39 institutes. The agreement is characterized as a “pilot” that will run for two years, with consortium members having access to Elsevier’s journal portfolio while being able to publish in around 90% of Elsevier journals in an open access format. According to reporting in The Scientist, “approximately 400 society-owned titles as well as some high-impact publications, such as those belonging to The Lancet and Cell Press imprints, are excluded” from the deal. The Financial Times reports that the total value of the deal is €9 million, which represents a 3% increase over what the consortium had previously been paying for read-only access. The FT characterized the deal economics (which we have not seen) as being based on the number of articles published:
Rather than charge a subscription fee for access to its journals, which is how the publisher has structured most of its deals, Elsevier will bill the Norwegian institutions for the close to 2,000 articles they expect to publish each year.
Thus it appears the license is a Publish and Read (PAR) deal as opposed to a Read and Publish (RAP) deal. If that is the case, this works out to approximately €4,500 ($5,050) per paper. This is a considerable premium over Wiley’s PAR deal in Germany, for which the Germany consortium (Projekt DEAL) is paying €2,750 per paper. We expect that library consortia around the world will be looking at this arrangement very closely.
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Source: Elsevier, The Scientist, Financial Times
7
The thing about Read and Publish (and Publish and Read) deals is that they only make sense (for the publisher) if there is a sufficient amount of publishing going on at licensing institutions on the other end of the deal. Gwen Evans, Executive Director of OhioLINK (the largest academic consortium in the US), applies the “Read” vs “Publish” nomenclature to institutions and consortia themselves, noting that research-intensive institutions, like the University of California (which produces approximately 10% of research papers in the US) fall toward the “Publish” end of the spectrum, whereas a liberal arts college will fall toward the “Read” side. The same applies to consortia—though matters become complicated when a consortium encompasses both “Read” and “Publish” institutions. This is a useful frame, which leads inexorably to her concluding remark:
There is no standard deal that will fit all consortia; some consortia may not be offered certain OA deals at all, or the OA deals on offer will not be financially viable without significant outside sources of funding.
Indeed, this is the central challenge of the OA mode in the long term: how to maintain sufficient revenues in the system to pay for publishing without shifting all the costs to a handful of “Publish” institutions. In the short term, the more practical question may be how might publishers and librarians best navigate the situation by including some component of open content in a deal given the variation in consortia profiles?
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Source: The Scholarly Kitchen
8
Writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Daniel Quintana argues that the way to ensure higher-quality publications is for funders to create their own journals. Publishing in these journals would be mandatory for grant recipients, and the journals would be closed to authors who are not recipients. This, Quintana says, would ensure a strong reputation for the journal even as it reduced the cost of publication. It seems to us that this has it wrong: Quintana apparently does not understand what editorial independence is. In the media world this is called the “separation of Church and State,” where editorial decisions are wholly independent of business issues. Third-party publications, whether of the OA or subscription variety, serve as a check on the perspective of a single granting body. What Quintana is proposing is a “house journal”; it would be as if a university press only published books by the parent institution’s faculty, and the faculty could publish nowhere else. (In actuality, only about 7% of university press authors come from a press’s parent institution.) Having offered this criticism, we acknowledge that there is a drift in Quintana’s direction. The creation of eLife was a first step, but the situation has progressed beyond that; as Quintana notes approvingly, “the Wellcome Trust, the Irish Health Research Board, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (one of the backers of Plan S) have each established their own open-access journals.”
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Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
9
Springer Nature has released data about the uptake of its SN SharedIt service, which allows researchers to share links to full-text articles; the recipient of the link is able to view the full text of the article regardless of access privileges (non-subscribers can view full-text articles—though downloading the PDF requires a subscription or payment). The technology underlying SN SharedIt was developed by ReadCube, which is owned by the same organization (Holtzbrinck Publishing Group) that owns a controlling interest in Springer Nature. In 2018, SN SharedIt was responsible for 7 million shareable links. Not surprisingly, the publication in Springer Nature’s portfolio that had the most shared links was Nature. It is noteworthy that the service shares links, not full text, though the links bring the user to full text. This allows Springer Nature to capture usage statistics and is a partial offset to the proliferation of copies of articles, legitimate and otherwise, across the Internet. While not a complete solution to the challenges of access, SN SharedIt appears to be proving a worthwhile tool in the publishing toolbox, expanding both access and making sharing content more convenient.
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Source: Springer Nature
10
Ruminating on the recent Fiesole conference, David Worlock sketches a view of what scholarly communications will look like—not next year, but after the noise of Plan S and kindred agendas slip into the past. He notes that the subscription model will never reassert itself, but it is not likely to disappear altogether, nor will OA be the sole coin of the realm. We are at the end of a beginning: “I was left feeling that just as we have been through Digital Replacement—all paper based content went digital – followed by Digital Transformation—the workflows and processes went digital and became wholly network interconnected—we now approach Digital Re-invention—in which the forms and artefacts of the analogue world themselves give way to digital connectivity.” One interesting comment is that Worlock asked the Fiesole publisher attendees if they “had an idea of the current proportion of usage made by non search bot machines.” We all know that the machines are coming, but perhaps they are already here.
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Source: DavidWorlock.com
11
The Scientist reports increasing concern about the number of papers published in predatory journals that appear in PubMed. While the journals in question are indexed in MEDLINE, papers from the journals nonetheless can be found in PubMed. This is because the papers were from NIH-funded researchers who, per NIH policy, are depositing their papers in PubMed Central (PMC). Once in PMC, the paper are indexed for PubMed. Hence, research published in journals with dubious or non-existent peer review is displayed side-by-side with research published in trusted MEDLINE-indexed journals. The problem was first pointed out back in 2017 (here and also here) and again last year (here) but appears to not yet been remediated by NLM 2 years later.
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Source: The Scientist, Neuroscience, Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, CMAJ
Higher Education
12
Merger news in the college textbook market: McGraw-Hill and Cengage have agreed to combine their companies. This is a big deal in every sense. The combined company (if antitrust concerns by regulators do not scuttle the deal) will control over 40,000 titles and have revenue of about $3.16 billion. Were it publicly traded, it would be worth about $5 billion, though still short of market leader Pearson ($8.5 billion). This deal has the potential to rearrange the marketplace. The implications of the deal have yet to be seen, but speculation abounds. Some believe that consolidation of this kind is bound to force up prices, which may indeed happen in the long term; in the short term, however, this appears to be more of a market-share play, with the real target being market leader Pearson, which has the most to lose if the industry is put under pricing pressure. And pricing pressure is what this merger is set out to do: by putting all the McGraw-Hill titles into Cengage Unlimited, aka a “Spotify for college textbooks,” students are likely to get much, even most of their classroom material from a single fixed-price subscription. This will also marginalize the huge used-textbook market (estimated to be about one-third of the total), as students purchase one subscription and nothing more. A lurking issue, undetected in any of the commentary we have seen thus far, is what will this mean for academic freedom? Will instructors be put under pressure, even institutional mandate, only to adopt texts from an all-you-can-eat subscription? Ask the textbook publishers and they will say no, but has anyone asked the professoriate yet?
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Source: The Wall Street Journal, EdSurge, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside HigherEd
13
Stanford has reversed its decision to reduce the subsidy it provides to its university press, at least for another year. The proposed cuts met with an uproar, as one would expect. Now the question is what the press will do with the additional time.
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Source: Inside HigherEd
14
In “Challenges to Higher Education’s Most Essential Purposes,” Kevin Guthrie, president of Ithaka, the parent of JSTOR, writes about the span of issues higher education will have to face in the coming years. These issues range from demography (the new and increasingly diverse composition of the students), the need to bring education to people who may not be able to participate in the conventional 4-year residential college, the decline in funding of public institutions, the changing nature of the economy into which future students must find a place, and the continuing need for humanities study even though enrollments are shifting toward the acquisition of career skills. The list of challenges is extensive and may seem insurmountable; indeed, a dystopian vision can come of these challenges—a society that is bifurcated between a small number of elite institutions and chronically underfunded institutions serving the vast majority of students. But the first step toward solving a problem is to meet it head on, and this essay points us in the right direction.
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Source: Ithaka S+R
15
If you have just had it with CDOs (collateralized debt obligations), perhaps you should make your way over to the counter selling ISAs (income-sharing agreements). ISAs have come about as an alternative to taking on student debt, which in the aggregate now comes to $1.5 trillion. ISAs work by having students receive a sum of money and then commit to paying a set percentage of their income for a number of years. If your income is small, the payments are small; but high earners may end up paying a pretty penny. Bloomberg Businessweek notes that “financiers are transforming student debtors into stock investments, with much of the same risk and, ideally, return.” Students have to sell a bigger or smaller piece of themselves depending on their major and its implications for future earnings. Thus English majors pay a higher percentage, or pay over a longer period of time, than computer science majors. It is troubling that discussions of this new phenomenon fail to note that what is at issue here used to be called indentured servitude.
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Source: Bloomberg Businessweek
16
What is the future of the academic monograph, the mainstay of humanities publishing? In an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jennifer Crewe, Director of Columbia University Press and President of the Association of University Presses, offers some insight into the current state of monograph publishing. The monograph has been declining as a commercial entity for some years, which obviously has implications for the presses that publish them, but also puts strain on the credentialing system in higher education. Crewe notes that scholarly authors must write books that will appeal to an audience far larger than the 4–5 members of a dissertation committee, but is quick to point out that Columbia, like other university presses, is willing to publish important works of scholarship even if they are likely to lose money. Most presses attempt to balance losses in monographs with surpluses elsewhere—in trade titles, for example, that, while carefully researched, are designed to reach an audience beyond the academy. Of interest is the growth of experimentation in Open Access monographs, as one way around the hard realities of the marketplace is to make the economic success of a book the responsibility of the author or the author’s institutional sponsor. But publishing a book alone, whether of the traditional or the OA variety, will not guarantee a job offer for a faculty position, as the tightness of university budgets and the job market are problematic in themselves.
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Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
Science & Technology
17
The biggest science story of the month is undoubtedly the announcement that scientists have developed the first ever image of a black hole. The details of the black hole itself are so far beyond human scale as to boggle the mind—its mass is over 6 billion times that of our sun and its diameter, if in our solar system, would stretch from the Sun all the way to Neptune. But the story behind development of the image itself is also massively impressive. To create this image required creating a telescope with a diameter the size of the earth, which was accomplished by chaining together a number of radio telescopes across the planet. The word “image” may be misleading—it is not as though the astronomers simply snapped a photo. The image had to be created from a tremendous amount of data, and that aspect of the project gave rise to an interesting sidebar to the project: the work of 29-year-old computer scientist Dr. Katherine Bouman, who spent 6 years working on the algorithm that finally rendered the image. (Dr. Bouman is quick to point out that she was but one of several people on the scientific team.) To critics who have complained that the image is a bit fuzzy, we note that the black hole in question is not only, you know, a black hole, but is in another galaxy. We note that the press coverage of this astonishing event struggles to express what has been seen; Nature calls the black hole the Gates of Hell and The New York Times compares it to the Eye of Sauron. While science journalism might struggle, one must never underestimate the ability of the Internet to succeed in finding the ridiculous in the awesome.
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Source: Nature, The New York Times, ScienceAlert, LeeTV Tech
18
Where it just about any other month, surely the discovery of another (long extinct) human species would be the biggest news in science. Researchers found what appears to be a new branch of our genus, “Homo luzonensis,” after Luzon Island in the Philippines where the remains were discovered. The remains of three individuals were found under the floor of a cave and dated to approximately 50,000 years ago. As The New York Times aptly notes, “The discovery adds growing complexity to the story of human evolution. It was not a simple march forward, as it once seemed. Instead, our lineage assumed an exuberant burst of strange forms along the way.”
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Source: Nature, The New York Times
19
In 1988 the US invested $3 billion into what became the human genome project. By “2012, human genome sequencing accounted for an estimated 280,000 jobs, $19 billion in personal income, $3.9 billion in federal taxes, and $2.1 billion in state and local taxes. And all for a price of $2 per year per U.S. resident.” This compelling statistic comes from a new book, “Jump-Starting America” (PublicAffairs, 2019), by MIT professors Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson. “Public investment in science has very big economic returns,” says Johnson in an interview with MIT News. “Every additional $10 million in public funding granted to the National Institutes of Health … on average produces 2.7 patents and an additional $30 million in value for the private-sector firms that own those patents. When it comes to military technology, each dollar in publicly funded R&D leads to another $2.50–$5.90 in private-sector investment.” Despite the compelling economics, investment in research dropped from 2% of GDP just after WWII to less than half that today. In addition to the number of dollars being spent, where those dollars are spent also matters, argue Gruber and Johnson. Investment in scientific research would benefit by being spread around the country, they say, and not just in the already-established centers such as the Bay Area, as high costs in those areas make research, innovation, and business development increasingly difficult.
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Source: MIT News, Jump-Starting America
20
In a truly fascinating story, Douglas Preston chronicles “the day the dinosaurs died.” This is the tale, written with all the punctuation-perfect eloquence that only The New Yorker can muster, of the crashing of an asteroid into Planet Earth 66 million years ago. The occasion of Preston’s piece is an astonishing fossil find in North Dakota by Robert DePalma, a graduate student in paleontology. The fossils included flora and fauna associated with the area near the impact site; DePalma theorizes that the force of the impact swept the material to its current location, where it fossilized, waiting for a lucky scientist to find it. This find and DePalma’s role and interpretation of it are provoking great controversy. Preston’s telling gets to the politics of science, with established scientists sniffily downplaying the work of a mere graduate student who is thought to “over-interpret.” Indeed, this story is as much about science writing as it is about science. Early on DePalma had contacted Preston, a much-published novelist, after reading one of his books: the publicity mill started early. DePalma published his findings in PNAS, which, interestingly, mentions the fossils, but there is nary a word about the dinosaurs that so fascinated Preston. For this Preston is being roundly criticized. Google “DePalma” and “fossil find” and you will hit a trove richer than what DePalma found in North Dakota. A random sample: Slate asserts that “it’s time for the heroic male paleontologist trope to go extinct” and calls Preston’s (exquisite) prose “breathless.” Not to be outdone, The Wire argues in a headline that the “New Yorker’s Dino Fossils Profile Features Pitfalls of ‘Science as Performance’.” This raises the question of who should write about science; As we search for a reliable narrator for this story, we nominate DePalma’s first cousin, the Hollywood director Brian DePalma, who perhaps would consider a block- (and earth-) buster about the very moment of impact.
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Source: The New Yorker, PNAS, The Wire, Slate
21
More things to worry about: A new camera can photograph you from 45 kilometers away.
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Source: MIT Technology Review
22
The MIT Media Lab has unveiled AlterEgo, “a non-invasive, wearable, peripheral neural interface that allows humans to converse in natural language with machines, artificial intelligence assistants, services, and other people without any voice … simply by articulating words internally.” (For those of us who rely heavily on filters between our brain and our mouths this could prove to be a challenging technology.) The device connects to a computer, enabling the system to provide feedback to the user via bone conduction. The aim is to have the computer, Internet, and AI weave into human intelligence as an internal “second self”—thus the name.
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Source: MIT Media Lab
Miscellany
23
The son of Christopher Columbus, Hernando Colón, was an avid and disciplined collector of books. He aimed to create what would have been the world’s largest library of his time, and ultimately amassed 15,000 titles, which taken together provide a near-comprehensive view of what the educated class of the time was reading beyond the classics. Colón also developed a catalog to the library, called Libro de los Epítomes. The manuscript for this catalog, 2,000 pages and a foot thick, has just been found. Among other things it includes summaries, some brief, some extensive (Plato’s complete works get 20 pages), of all the titles in the collection, many of which have been lost. Thus the Libro de los Epítomes is a snapshot of the intellectual life of the time, a historical artifact of great value to today’s historians. The manuscript was found in the library collection of the University of Copenhagen.
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Source: The Guardian
From Our Own Pens
24
Joe wrote a piece on the announcement of cutbacks (since revoked) at Stanford University Press. Joe notes that universities set priorities and managing—and funding—an in-house publishing operation is not likely to sit at the top of the heap. For presses to become more beloved by their parents, they must align themselves with the key research centers of the university. It is also essential to seek financial independence so that universities don’t have to choose between funding a press or other academic areas.
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Source: The Scholarly Kitchen
25
Joe also inked an article about the new European publishing project called University Journals (UJ). UJ is a consortium of academic institutions that plans to leverage existing infrastructure to build a platform for materials, with the special selling point that there will be no APCs nor any charge for access. Joe analyzes the proposal in the context of the reputation economy in which most journal publishing exists
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Source: The Scholarly Kitchen
26
Michael’s article on “Navigating the Big Deal” was republished in the Scholarly Kitchen. The article describes how Big Deals and other publisher packages work from the perspective of societies that work with commercial publishers. The challenge for such societies is avoiding publisher “lock-in”—a scenario where the journal revenue of a society is no longer portable and the value has been effectively transferred to a publisher package.
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Source: The Scholarly Kitchen
Meetings & Events
We will be attending the following events. Let us know if you would like to set up some time to chat. We’d love to hear from you (info@ce-strategy.com).
- Society for Scholarly Publishing Annual Meeting, May 29–31, 2019, San Diego, CA
- Association for University Presses Annual Meeting, June 11, Detroit, MI
- American Library Association Annual Conference and Exhibition, June 20–25, 2019, Washington, DC
***
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers. ― Charles W. Eliot