Group items tagged

PeerJ's first clutch of 30 articles have been published. One interesting feature is the DOI which is of the form 10.7717/peerj.nn (maybe I should have put in 6 or 7 "n"s......). The PeerJ site is elegantly designed, and the images are of very high quality e.g. https://dfzljdn9uc3pi.cloudfront.net/2013/36/1/fig-9-2x.jpg. If PeerJ had not restricted itself to STEM (and how long would that last) I could see it "sweeping all before it".

A consideration by Eric van de Velde of why MOOCs have caught the eye and the imagination of HE leaders in a way that OA never did. Poses three questions: 1. Why do academic leaders not make the same calculation with respect to OA? 2. Why do they fear the potential of OA-caused disruption? 3. Why do they embrace the potential of MOOCs-caused disruption? Puts forward four not entirely convincing explanatory conjectures: 1. MOOCs are in their infancy, providing cover for their pedagogic inadequacy, and allowing for experimentation. 2. MOOCs provide big first mover advantages. (Hasn't PLOS had FMA?). 3. In contrast with OA MOOCs put control in the hands of teachers (!). 4. OA is not sufficiently disruptive (PeerJ, however, is).

Joseph Esposito writes in the "The Scholarly Kitchen" about what he sees as an O'Reilly shaped (dominated) ecosystem in which the Safari Books approach to online publishing and all that it entails becomes an important model, that will spread into journal publishing too (PeerJ will be built on Safari, according to Esposito.