Paper trading - a new business model for journals? Latest issue of Learned
Publishing now out
Paper trading - what's so new about that? Not much, you might think, except
that the trade is in authors, not the papers themselves. Big business in
China, according to Sonqin Lin in his opinion piece in this issue of Learned
Publishing - just one of the naughty activities that they are trying to
stamp out. There always seems to be something new, different and surprising
about their publishing system - did you know, for example, that many of
their scientific journal editors do not have experience as authors or
researchers? - almost unthinkable in the West, and Xiao-Jun He describes
what a difference it makes for him to be an author as well as an editor.
Talking of opinion pieces, we do have a weighty and very readable one from
Kent Anderson on the perils of funder involvement in publishing. I've
mentioned the potential dangers of 'he who pays the piper calls the tune'
before, only to hear an executive from a funding council, years later, use
the same phrase, with a different intent, completely unconscious,
apparently, of those dangers. Kent spells them out, and whether he's
singling out E-Life or speaking more generally, it's trenchant stuff.
There always seems to be a tendency to concentrate on the STM world in
general discussions on academic publishing, so it's good to have something
specifically focused on humanities. Emma Bennett has done an in-depth survey
of a group of US humanities societies to see how they feel about things and
especially, the challenges they face - and there are some contrasts with
that familiar (to most) STM perspective.
Specifically on challenges once more David Attis and Colin Kroposke keep us
informed on what those might be for libraries, based on surveys of
librarians. administrators and publishers etc and come up with 30 lessons
and challenges that bear thinking about.
Sven Fund, CEO of De Gruyter, thinks we should have what he calls
'Integrated Publishing'. You'll have to read the piece to see what he really
means by this, but he's fairly critical of our (publishers') 'organisational
inertia' as he calls it.
And then on to some new stuff - we're all learning about other kinds of
metrics that might be used to evaluate papers and authors - so we have a
nice piece from Euan Adie and William Roe of Altmetric explaining how they
get measures from social media, blogs etc and put it all together (and even
what they charge for it!).
Not that new, but even the editor gets on the bandwagon in his rather nerdy
way, and in his editorial whinges about APCs - not APCs themselves, but on
what the acronym stands for! It is important, if you think perception is
important.
What with those book reviews and another article or two, it's not a bad
issue.
See you in three months.
Alan Singleton
Editor-in-Chief
Learned Publishing
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Learned Publishing Volume 26 No 1 January 2013
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