E-book formats are a mess - who says so?- latest issue of Learned Publishing
now out

Thad McIlroy, that's who. And he should know. In case you thought EPUB 3.0
solved it all at a stroke (or have no idea what I'm talking about), do check
out his trenchant opinion piece in the October issue and see whether you
agree. Amazon do get a bit of a kicking - but they are big boys and girls,
and I'm sure can take it.

Somewhat related, if you are one of those knowing that making your 'stuff'
available on mobiles is important, but either don't know how to start or
whether you are doing it the right way, another opinion piece by Charlie
Rapple can give you some pointers and help avoid some traps in thinking for
the unwary. If, instead or as well, generally revamping your website is
important to you, then David Payne and Daniel Berhane's case study on the
use of the Drupal content management system for the BMJ could also prove
useful - 6 million page views and 1.5 million unique visitors a month are a
few more than they get at ALPSP or even Learned Publishing, but we can hope,
and the issues are not just those of scale or volume.

We always like to have something on the naughty parts of publishing,
especially if it's not publishers who are at fault - this time we have a
pretty large study on plagiarism, not, as we've had a lot in the past, about
the basic detection, but on what view you take of it? That is, for example,
say you detect some duplication between papers, how much is acceptable with
or without attribution? Helen Zhang and Xiaoyan Jia have conducted a global
(both Anglophone and non-Anglophone) study to see what journals actually do
- you'll find some interesting differences in attitudes and approach,
particularly between stm and humanities and social sciences - but of course
I'm not going to tell you what they are.  One crucial component is knowing
who the author is or purports to be (and more on that in our next issue!) -
but for many other reasons too it's good to be able to identify and track
authorship - and that's where the project ORCID (acronym explained in the
text of course, but do note that there's no 'H') comes in, in an article by
five authors led by Laurel Hank - (so I'll no longer be able to claim credit
for all those biochemistry papers written by my namesake) - its core mission
is to provide  unique and persistent identifiers, where individuals own
their own record.

Peer review is another perennial favourite for us, and we have another
Chinese author whose paper extends beyond China (unusual but very welcome),
where Xiangyi Zhang takes a fairly straightforward look at any differences
in response between Chinese and non-Chinese reviewers - results are perhaps
not what you would expect.

Two more meaty research articles which help inform the readership about
different aspects of the whole publishing process. First, those two great
luminaries of measurement of what researchers actually do, Carol Tenopir and
Donald King,  this time aided and abetted by Rachel Volentine, have looked
at article and book reading patterns in six UK universities - but of course
with all the series data that they have from previous studies they can track
and compare this over time and over national boundaries - they do all that
and try to draw out some points for publishers. Then we have one of our
rather rare items from the library world. We all know about COUNTER, and how
it is used to measure and judge serial usage, but perhaps not on how much it
is employed in France? Well, now you can find out in Cherifa
Boukacem-Zegmouri and Joachim Schopfel's  piece - would you be surprised to
learn that many French 'vendors' (to use the library term) don't provide
usage statistics?

In this review of the contents we started with a 'trenchant' piece by Thad.
In amongst the book reviews which come at the end (always free to access, as
is the editorial), you'll find something equally trenchant from Dave
Nicholas who takes a look at 2 books from the library and information world,
partly to see if and how they do comprehend the wider domain in which they
sit..

Lastly, a mention for the editorial from my co-editor Diane Scott-Lichter,
obviously a Paul Simon fan - not sure I should call her Still Crazy After
all These Years, but she's certainly valuable - you'll need to check her
piece out if you want to find out what she's saying and what I could
possibly mean

See you again in three months.	

Alan Singleton
Editor-in-Chief, Learned Publishing
---------------
Learned Publishing Volume 25 No 4 October 2012
http://www.learned-publishing.org

 
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