Introduction The Portable Document Format (PDF) has reigned supreme in academic publishing for decades since its introduction by Adobe in the early 1990s. Its promise of preserving the exact look and layout of a document, regardless of the operating system, software, or hardware, was revolutionary for scholarly communication. A downloaded PDF from an obscure journal … Read more
Introduction Discussing Donald Trump and the publishing industry is like watching a financial thriller with a side of constitutional drama. He’s been simultaneously a boon to book sales and a potential disaster for the bedrock principles that publishing stands on: free expression, open discourse, and a stable, predictable economic environment. The sheer volume of books … Read more
Introduction For centuries, the academic publishing world operated on a relatively “stable” model: scholars wrote research papers for free, editors and peer reviewers volunteered their time, and then commercial publishers or learned societies sold the final product back to university libraries at eye-watering subscription prices. It’s an arrangement that has often felt more like a … Read more
Introduction The promise of open access was a thrilling, almost utopian vision for scholarly publishing: immediate, free access to research for everyone, everywhere. It was supposed to tear down the paywalls that had turned publicly funded knowledge into a commodity accessible only to well-endowed institutions. Among the various open access models that emerged, Gold Open … Read more
Introduction The publishing world has always been a little dusty, hasn’t it? Full of weighty tomes, quiet libraries, and the almost-mystical process of turning a manuscript into something you can hold. But right now, the air is thick with the buzz of something utterly transformative: artificial intelligence. This isn’t just about a fancier spell-check app. … Read more