Public universities are under assault

An unholy alliance is slowly forming between traditionalist defenders of the university as an "ivory tower" and market-obsessed modernisers determined to transform higher education into a consumer good. Both have come to the – mistaken – conclusion that the idea of the public university must be abandoned. For very different reasons, of course.

Measuring Value in Open Access Repositories

Measuring Value in Open Access Repositories

Open access institutional repositories were created to promote access to information, encourage scholarly communication, and demonstrate institutional prestige. While these repositories have been widely adopted, the quality of their contents often fails to represent their institution's scholarly output. Moreover, current research uses measurements of quantity, not quality, to assess their value. In response, this article opens new areas of scholarly inquiry by assessing the quality of contents. This is accomplished through a cross-sectional study of repositories at American colleges and universities across the academic spectrum, using citation indexing to identify an institution's articles and authors of highest impact.

Are You a Press or Are You a Library? An Interview with NYU’s Monica McCormick

This is the first article in a new series, Digital Challenges to Academic Publishing, by guest author Adeline Koh. Each article in this series will feature an interview with an academic publisher, press or journal editor on how their organization is changing in response to the digital world.

Shatzkin: Publishers Should Experiment With E-Book Library Lending

In his new blog post today, Mike Shatzkin suggests that major publishers should experiment with e-book library lending to try to find a profitable way to do it.

The influence of free encyclopedias on science

Since its launch in 2001 Wikipedia has seen incredible growth worldwide, counting more than 21 million articles published in around 280 languages (including nearly 4 million articles in English) in 2012 (1). Wikipedia has grown in size (number of Wikipedia entries/articles have been increasing over time) and is showing high reliability: a recent study (2) of historical entries found 80% accuracy for Wikipedia, compared to 95-96% for other sources. This means that for the entries checked in the study, Wikipedia contain on average only about 15% more errors than other sources including traditionally perceived authoritative sources such as Encyclopaedia Britannica. The research found that this difference was negligible. Adding to this Wikipedia’s ease of access and wide coverage of topics explains why for many people it has become the first port of call for instant general knowledge on a variety of subjects.

Insight into scholary e-books today and in the future

From Research Information

Choosing e-books: a perspective from academic libraries

This study focuses directly and in depth on the buying and selection processes and criteria. Insights offered by this study may be of value to publishers, aggregators and librarians.

Coercive Citation in Academic Publishing

From article in  Science 3 February 2012:
Vol. 335 no. 6068 pp. 542-543 : 

Despite their shortcomings (1–4), impact factors continue to be a primary means by which academics “quantify the quality of science” (5). One side effect of impact factors is the incentive they create for editors to coerce authors to add citations to their journal. Coercive self-citation does not refer to the normal citation directions, given during a peer-review process, meant to improve a paper. Coercive self-citation refers to requests that (i) give no indication that the manuscript was lacking in attribution; (ii) make no suggestion as to specific articles, authors, or a body of work requiring review; and (iii) only guide authors to add citations from the editor's journal. This quote from an editor as a condition for publication highlights the problem: “you cite Leukemia [once in 42 references]. Consequently, we kindly ask you to add references of articles published in Leukemia to your present article” (6). Gentler language may be used, but the message is clear: Add citations or risk rejection.