Publishing Ecosystem Research Articles

Open Access and the Big Deal Sharing Space in the Netherlands

Open Access and the Big Deal are often thought to occupy opposite ends of the spectrum of openness in scholarly publishing. Universities in the Netherlands are changing that by negotiating OA publishing services into their Big Deals. This has been successfully arranged with three publishers already, and negotiations continue with Elsevier. While there are precedents for converting subscription payments to OA payments, such as the Sponsoring Coalition for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics, this new arrangement could have a big impact. The deal has the potential to quickly convert a large number of articles from toll access to OA and to do so without dramatically disturbing the scholarly publishing ecosystem. There are questions about its sustainability and scalability, but it's a project worth watching.

Navigating the Publishing Rights Landscape

The need for interoperable rights metadata across all sectors in the publishing ecosystem has become urgent. While much work has been done and is being done, it is often sector-specific. This article reviews the work on rights metadata underway in a variety of sectors—journals, book publishing, libraries, news media, and magazines—in the interest of promoting greater collaboration toward the vision of true interoperability that will enable publishers to manage their intellectual assets most effectively.

Will Open Access Change the Game?

Open access has been the pivotal change in relations between libraries and academic publishers in the last decade. Not only has it introduced a potentially disruptive business model threatening the publishing ecosystem, but it has also put the individual researcher back into the fray. The long-term impact of the emerging pattern of different forms of publishing has been largely overlooked so far. It is about to change academic publishing from a producing, content-driven industry into a service industry, with significant consequences for all parties of the ecosystem.

Vision, Strategy, Architecture: Where is the New Publishing Ecosystem?

Vision, Strategy, Architecture: Where is the New Publishing Ecosystem?

The Imperative for Open Altmetrics

The Imperative for Open Altmetrics

Reason, Risk, and Reward: Models for Libraries and Other Stakeholders in an Evolving Scholarly Publishing Ecosystem

Scholarly publishing, and scholarly communication more generally, are based on patterns established over many decades and even centuries. Some of these patterns are clearly valuable and intimately related to core values of the academy, but others were based on the exigencies of the past, and new opportunities have brought into question whether it makes sense to persist in supporting old models. New technologies and new publishing models raise the question of how we should fund and operate scholarly publishing and scholarly communication in the future, moving away from a scarcity model based on the exchange of physical goods that restricts access to scholarly literature unless a market-based exchange takes place. This essay describes emerging models that attempt to shift scholarly communication to a more open-access and mission-based approach and that try to retain control of scholarship by academics and the institutions and scholarly societies that support them. It explores changing practices for funding scholarly journals and changing services provided by academic libraries, changes instituted with the end goal of providing more access to more readers, stimulating new scholarship, and removing inefficiencies from a system ready for change.

Excellence or quality? Impact of the current competition regime on science and scientific publishing in Latin America and its implications for development

The current competition regime that characterizes international science is often presented as a quest for excellence. It diversely affects research in Latin America and research in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. This article asks how this competition regime may orient the direction of research in Latin America, and to whose advantage. It is argued that, by relating excellence to quality differently, a research policy that seeks to improve the level of science in Latin America while preserving the possibility of solving problems relevant to the region can be designed. Competition, it is also argued, certainly has its place in science, but not as a general management tool, especially if the goal is to improve overall quality of science in Latin America. Scientific competition is largely managed through journals and their reputation. Therefore, designing a science policy for Latin America (and for any ‘peripheral’ region of the world) requires paying special attention to the mechanisms underpinning the production, circulation and consumption of scientific journals. So-called ‘international’ or ‘core’ journals are of particular interest as local, national, or even regional journals must struggle to find their place in this peculiar publishing eco-system.

Knowledge Unlatched: An Argument for Academic Scholarship in Law to be Open and How it Might be Achieved

AbstractThe market in academic monographs is problematic, and sales have been in decline for decades. Concurrently, Open Access models of publishing are being developed and open content licenses designating a ‘some rights reserved’ status for content have been employed to provide a legal framework to reflect the changing ways content is used online. In the context of these innovations, Frances Pinter and Nicholas Bown describe Knowledge Unlatched, a not-for-profit library consortium project which seeks to combine a financially viable Open Access model with the use of open content licences to create a more efficient market in scholarly books to the benefit of all stakeholders in the academic publishing ecosystem.

Digital Publishing

Publishing is changing because of digital technologies. Does this herald a renaissance for the industry? What threats and opportunities does digital publishing bring? Most notable of the changes it has made possible are new attitudes to consumers, communities, content, and collaboration. Digital publishing enables publishers to get closer to the consumers of their products, as the growing interest in niche publishing illustrates. Digital publishing allows publishers to cultivate consumer communities based on a better understanding of consumers’ interests, on which publishers can build consumer loyalty and trust. Digital publishing lets publishers maximize the value of the content they own and leverage this with digital techniques for content discoverability and marketing. Digital publishing also makes creative collaboration easier. This combination of things challenges conventions and suggests a new publishing model, based on facilitating a dynamic publishing ecosystem.There are four practical consequences for digital publishers: coordination is essential for making the most of this new publishing ecosystem; cultivation and curation of content and of content-creators are more important than ever; communication—information-sharing—gives the ecosystem vitality; and the convergence of different media increases diversity and dynamism. Some publishers can be seen to be working more innovatively, costeffectively, and productively in the digital environment, while not losing touch with their time-honoured skills. The model of an information ecosystem illustrates how the consumer-community marketplace works. Digital marketing also operates within this information ecosystem.In practice, there are four things digital publishers can concentrate on: using converging media, encouraging consumers to communicate, listening to consumers and cultivating the content they’re interested in, and coordinating creative collaboration among all involved. Of these, creative collaboration may prove to be the most important. In sum, despite predictions of gloom, the indications are that the impact of digital publishing is taking the industry to the dawn of a renaissance.