Independent Thinking on Publishing's Future
Introduction The question of whether American publishing is in decline is one that gets tossed around with predictable regularity. On one hand, you hear the doom-and-gloom reports: book sales are slowing, attention spans are shrinking, and the cultural landscape is fragmenting. On the other hand, publishing houses are still inking massive deals, BookTok is turning … Read more
Introduction Welcome to the academic jungle. For years now, a particular species of profiteer has been multiplying rapidly, masquerading as legitimate scholarly communication: the predatory journals. These entities, driven by profit rather than scholarship, exploit the open access publishing model and the academic pressure to “publish or perish.” They promise rapid publication, often for a … Read more
Introduction The relationship between political administrations and the scientific community is always a complex dance, but under Donald Trump, it quickly turned into an aggressive, one-sided tango. For the world of scientific publishing, the impact wasn’t just about uncomfortable headlines. It was a deep, systemic threat to the bedrock of evidence-based research: funding, data access, … Read more
Introduction Most established, indexed journals can still be trusted, but predatory journals, paper mills and a flood of submissions mean no reader can take a journal’s name on faith any more. This article explains what makes a journal trustworthy, how the system is being gamed, and the checks anyone can use to judge a journal. … Read more
Introduction The PDF has been academic publishing’s default format for three decades, but it was built for paper, not for phones, screen readers or AI. This article asks whether HTML and XML will finally replace it, and why the honest answer is “not entirely, and not soon”. Key points The Portable Document Format (PDF) has … Read more