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"How does publication pressure in modern-day universities affect the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards in science? By using a worldwide survey among demographers in developed and developing countries, the authors show that the large majority perceive the publication pressure as high, but more so in Anglo-Saxon countries and to a lesser extent in Western Europe. However, scholars see both the pros (upward mobility) and cons (excessive publication and uncitedness, neglect of policy issues, etc.) of the so-called publish-or-perish culture. By measuring behavior in terms of reading and publishing, and perceived extrinsic rewards and stated intrinsic rewards of practicing science, it turns out that publication pressure negatively affects the orientation of demographers towards policy and knowledge sharing. There are no signs that the pressure affects reading and publishing outside the core discipline."
Michael Eisen
I'm an evolutionary biologist at UC Berkeley and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. My research focuses on the evolution and population genomics of gene regulation in flies, and on the ways that microbes control animal behavior. I am a strong proponent of open science, and a co-founder of the Public Library of Science. And most importantly, I am a Red Sox fan.
"The infinite bookshelf is already a problem for us. To add to the fun, once we enter the world of ebooks, nothing ever goes out of print. So works going back many years or decades are presented with equal priority to the latest new titles.
Upshot: we badly need better curation. Amazon and their competitors could present the results of author searches pre-sorted by time since publication and by language and by series. But that's barely a start.
Genre, in the ebook space, is a ball and chain. It stops you reaching new audiences who might like your work."
Some typologies on length and style of fictional series.
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I’ve talked before about the different kinds of series, which I summed up as:
Style One, The Lord of the Rings, one book with extra pieces of cardboard.
Style Two, Doctrine of Labyrinths, where you have some volume closure but need to read the books in order.
Style Three, Vlad and Vorkosigan, where the cumulative effect of reading all of them is to give you a story arc and more investment in the characters, but it doesn’t really matter where you start and whether you read them in order.
Style Four, Union Alliance, where the volumes are completely independent of each other though they may reflect interestingly on each other
"After I recommended that the major publishers drop mandatory DRM from their ebook products, I realized that my essay had elided a bunch of steps in my thinking, and needed to reconsider some points. Then I realized that it's not a simple, straightforward argument to make. Consequently, I ended up writing another essay, although I've tried to summarize my conclusions below. "
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1. The rapid current pace of change in the electronic publishing sector is driven by the consumer electronics and internet industry. It's impossible to make long term publishing plans (3-10 years) without understanding these other industries and the priorities of their players. It is important to note that the CE industry relies on selling consumers new gadgets every 1-3 years. And it is through their gadgets that readers experience the books we sell them. Where is the CE industry taking us?
2. Dropping DRM across all of Macmillans products will not have immediate, global, positive effects on revenue in the same way that introducing the agency model did ...
3. However, relaxing the requirement for DRM across some of Macmillans brands will have very positive public relations consequences among certain customer demographics, notably genre readers who buy large numbers of books (and who, while a minority in absolute numbers, are a disproportionate source of support for the midlist).
4. Longer term, removing the requirement for DRM will lower the barrier to entry in ebook retail, allowing smaller retailers (such as Powells) to compete effectively with the current major incumbents. This will encourage diversity in the retail sector, force the current incumbents to interoperate with other supply sources (or face an exodus of consumers), and undermine the tendency towards oligopoly. This will, in the long term, undermine the leverage the large vendors currently have in negotiating discount terms with publishers while improving the state of midlist sales.
"We're going to get some insight into this question over the next decade or so as e-readers - in the form of both devices and apps - spread and become even cheaper. As Caroline Winter of Bloomberg Businessweek reports, in two of the most prosperous Western countries - the U.S. and Germany - the adoption of electronic books has so far taken very different routes."
"The people who created modern fantasy, safe to say, were not normal. They led reasonably normal lives, perhaps, but the territory inside their skulls was well off anybody’s map. Think of William Morris obsessively detailing floral wallpaper designs while his wife Jane was off boffing Dante Rossetti; James Branch Cabell spending decades writing his arch, umpty-volume saga about human futility while the twentieth century sang its song of greed, progress, and mass murder; JRR Tolkien (catholic and married in a day when Oxford dons just weren’t) doing scholarly work on the Oxford English Dictionary while secretly transforming his linguistic obsessions into the neography of Middle Earth; and Mervyn Peake— well, just look at Gormenghast, will you?"
As a way of fighting unauthorized sharing of digital files, DRM is particularly stupid. It not only doesn't work -- DRM is always broken, and DRM-less versions quickly produced -- it also makes the official versions less valuable than the pirated ones, since they are less convenient to use in multiple ways. As a result, DRM actually makes piracy more attractive, which is probably why most of the music industry eventually decided to drop it.
Sadly, the world of ebooks seems unable to learn from that experience, and insists on making the same mistakes by using DRM widely. But it turns out that there are even more problems in the publishing domain, as this fascinating tale of how DRM acts as a barrier to entry in the online bookstore market makes clear
"Making revisions in response to referees' comments can be challenging and sometimes discouraging. A pragmatic step-by-step approach can help overcome barriers."
"OSF is an open collaboration of scientists to increase the alignment between scientific values and scientific practices. Efforts include development of tools and infrastructure, and conducting research about scientific practices. Infrastructure and tool projects include tools to improve and document scientific workflow and defining Replication Value of existing findings. Research projects include the Reproducibility Project evaluating the replicability of published psychological science, and a survey of opinions about disclosure standards in scientific reportin"
"Reproducibility is supposedly a basic tenet of science, but a number of fields have raised concerns that modern publishing pressures inhibit replication of experiments. In a well-known 2005 PLoS Medicine essay, epidemiologist John Ioannidis, now at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, argued that in biomedicine, many if not most published research claims are false. He outlined a number of factors—including small sample sizes, small effect sizes, and “flexibility” in the research process—that contribute to a high rate of false positives. One reason those false positives aren't caught is because of a lack of emphasis on replication studies, which is “standard across fields of science,” says Columbia University statistician Victoria Stodden, who studies reproducibility and openness in computational science. "
"DRM on ebooks is dead. (Or if not dead, it's on death row awaiting a date with the executioner.)
It doesn't matter whether Macmillan wins the price-fixing lawsuit bought by the Department of Justice. The point is, the big six publishers' Plan B for fighting the emerging Amazon monopsony has failed (insofar as it has been painted as a price-fixing ring, whether or not it was one in fact). This means that they need a Plan C. And the only viable Plan C, for breaking Amazon's death-grip on the consumers, is to break DRM. "
"Since its inception in the early part of the 20th century, the theory of quantum mechanics has consistently baffled many of the great physicists of our time. But while the ideas of quantum physics are challenging and notoriously weird, they seem to capture the public imagination and hold an enduring appeal. Evidence of this comes in part from the numerous popular-science books that have been written on the topic over the years. This episode in the Physics World books podcast series looks at the popularity of quantum mechanics in science writing"
"TJM.org is the website of Tim McCormick. I work for HighWire Press, Stanford University, in Palo Alto, CA, as Sr. Product Manager for Emerging Content. Also reader, writer, library student."
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The source of that massive fall-off at the midpoint is seemingly simple: all books published in the U.S. in 1922 or earlier are in the public domain. What's immediately apparent from this graph is the fact that copyright is limiting the public's access to older works—but why and how, exactly? The answer lies in the reality of what a copyright is really worth, commercially, and how long it retains that value—and it sheds light on another problem with copyright law.
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