An article by Kent Anderson in Scholarly Kitchen reviewed four of the megajournals (although by the end of a longish article, he decided that there was only really one megajournal: PLOS ONE, which is today publishing around 100 articles …
David Crotty, in a Scholarly Kitchen post, talked about declining editorial standards, and suggested that “digital disruption” was at least partly to blame. “Digital disruption” is the phrase used by Clayton Christensen in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma. Christensen’s …
One paradox of being involved in digital search is that it is easy to forget the look and feel of actual books and how they are discovered. When you have a free moment, you realise the way books are found in …
Is this, as Mandy Hill suggested in her keynote, “the age of the university press”? Certainly the timing of this conference (the University Press REDUX Conference, Liverpool, 16-17 March 2016) was well-nigh perfect. The organisers should be commended for thinking up the …
This blog has contained several versions of ontology definitions (here and here), but I’ve never seen one in the form of a limerick before, and I couldn’t resist quoting it. This is by Margie Hlava, and all credit …
An excellent session of the London Text Analytics Group (March 14) contrasted two approaches to sentiment analysis: one proudly (and publicly) ditches grammar, while the other uses grammar to disambiguate content. Both approaches made ambitious claims for their software; which is …
There have been many comments on listservs in the past few weeks about Sci-Hub, the illegal Russian service that makes many scholarly articles available free of charge. I do not condone Sci-Hub for a moment – I have …
A common complaint by end users is how difficult it is to find books, whether online, or in a print bookshop. A recent presentation by Kat Meyer of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), a trade association of publishers, revealed …
A report by Ann Okerson and Alex Holzman (July 2015) published by CLIR was awarded the 2016 Library Publishing Coalition award for outstanding scholarship. The report looks at libraries as publishers – not just of catalogues, but of original …
Ben Ratliff, a music critic on the New York Times, wrote in The Guardian about Spotify’s Discover Weekly recommendation engine (“Slave to the algorithm: how music fans can reclaim their playlists from Spotify” 21 Feb 2016). This service provides an …
There have been many comments on listservs in the past few weeks about Sci-Hub, the illegal Russian service that makes many scholarly articles available free of charge. I do not condone Sci-Hub for a moment – I have …
