“BioBibliometrics.” Sounds almost holy, doesn’t it? It’s a useful new word to describe the impending nuptials of content and reader that’s starting to be possible thanks to Near Field Communications (NFC)-enabled smartphones, a development that promises to do away with clunky old encumbrances of yesterday such as usernames, passwords, credit cards, and bookshelves. I am →
From the downward spiral of ebook prices to the major content grab of digital giants such as Amazon, Apple, and Google, the writer as we know it is seriously threatened. In a letter released by the Authors Guild, an advocate for writers’ interests in effective copyright protection, fair contracts and free expression, bestselling novelist Richard →
Just weeks after Amazon’s highly controversial acquisition of GoodReads, major scientific publisher Elsevier has pulled a similar content grab by purchasing Mendeley, a cloud-based social media platform featuring open source content provided by academics. A detailed summary of the argument against Elsevier’s recent acquisition can be found at The Cost of Knowledge, but essentially, academics →
The release of the iPad Mini as a dedicated e-reader device suggests that e-readers are following a technology trend set by laptops and cell phones: the smaller, the better. At the same time, legibility on an e-reader screen is instrumental to its functionality. With the iPad Mini, Apple is delicately toeing the line of streamlined technology →
Some online publishers searching for alternative business models to the traditional one, where the readers pay for content, arrive at the sponsorship and advertising models, where private interests pay the publisher to make content available for free. This is in return for some benefit to the sponsor, which may involve a sponsor logo or pop-up →
At the American Association for Clinical Chemistry Annual Meeting in San Diego, the new international Editorial Board of “Young’s Effects Online” convenes for the first time, with distinguished doctors and scientists from around the world—India, Germany, Sweden, and the United States — collaborating on this lifesaving resource. “Young’s Effects” serves as a dashboard to some 50 years of →