An unusual new OA journal is the Journal of Brief Ideas, containing “citable ideas in fewer than 200 words” which are published under a CC-BY license. Interesting idea, but the title is not going into JURN just yet. The journal is in beta, for one thing. I also suspect that a clear focus on rational evidence-based discourse may be difficult to maintain, once wider audiences find it and realise it’s a free-for-all platform. The curation, such as it is, seems too light-touch to allow the journal’s reputation to survive a surge of articulate loons.

However, I’ve often thought that a normal journal might usefully have such short pieces — perhaps tight summary surveys of each of the field’s knowledge gaps (“what we know that we don’t know”). Perhaps such an article series might run alongside a series of imaginative ‘brief ideas’ articles on how those knowledge gaps might be filled. A third series might briefly outline the field’s as-yet unexplored interdisciplinary potentials.

The world will soon have a new open access journal on bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, ledgernomics and blockchain applications. Ledger will be Open Access, but is not yet in JURN since the first issue won’t be published until 2016.

The Biological Journal of the Linnean Society‘s July 2015 issue (Vol 115 Part 3) is devoted to biological recording, celebrating and documenting 50 years of the UK’s Biological Records Centre as a pioneer of citizen science. The issue is currently free.

Government decrees closure of all humanities degrees. No, it’s not another crazed Putin pronouncement from Russia. It’s sober Japan…

Many social sciences and humanities faculties in Japan are to close after universities were ordered to “serve areas that better meet society’s needs”. Of the 60 national universities which offer courses in these disciplines, 26 have confirmed they will either close or scale back their relevant faculties at the behest of Japan’s government. … 17 national universities will stop recruiting students to humanities…”

…[the move in Japan is] linked to a low birth rate and falling numbers of students, which has led to many institutions running at less than 50 per cent of capacity.”

And the situation is only likely to get worse. In population terms Japan is headed back to where it was in 1955…

Source: IPSS (National Institute of Population and Social Security Research) via IEEE.

So it seems that the same blanket closure of humanities departments may soon be forced on other nations in steep demographic decline, such as Russia and most of post-socialist Eastern Europe. Possibly even southern Italy.

Which is one reason why I’ve been so pleased to see the amazing baby boom we’ve been having here in the UK over the past five years, which shows no sign of stopping any time soon. We seem to have babies and toddlers everywhere you look, and the supermarkets usually now dedicate two double-sided aisles to romper-suits, nappies, toddler clothes, baby food etc. Midwives are worked off their feet, and infant school reception classes are so full that the kids are almost falling out the windows. And I’d take a bet that these kids are going to be remaking and reinventing British youth culture circa 2023-28, and then surging into the universities circa 2026-35.

“Measuring Journal Linking Success from a Discovery Service”, March 2015…

OpenURL has become, in a sense, the glue that holds the infrastructure of traditional library research together, connecting citations and full text. … [We found that] One-click (OpenURL) resolution was noticeably poorer [than Summon], with about 60% of requests leading directly to the correct fulltext item. More alarming, we found that, of full-text requests linked through an OpenURL, a large portion — 20% — fail.”

So… 40% of fulltext requests go to the wrong item? And 20% fail altogether. That sounds to me like a 60% failure rate.

The Guardian‘s ‘Anonymous Academic’ runs some numbers today on overly expensive academic hardbacks, the sort that gather dust on the shelves of university libraries…

Seventy-five books [per editor, per year], £80 each, selling on average 300 copies. That’s £1.8m. And he’s just one of their commissioning editors.”

The Guardian‘s academic was told that “friends [can] act as reviewers” for his book proposal. And that the author and his proposal-reviewer “friends” might also add the book to class reading lists, and thus ease it toward becoming a library purchase. Left unsaid, at least in the publisher’s initial phone pitch, is the implication that “friends” might also write book reviews of the title after publication.

These are the sort of books for which there will never be a cheap paperback version, just the choice of a very nice £60-£80 case-bound hardback or an ebook only that’s only slightly cheaper than the paper edition. By my rough calculation the profit per £75 book is around £12,000, even on only 300 sales. To reach that figure I assume each book proposal is swiftly handed off after approval to a home-working freelance, who might be paid £4,500 per book to get it into a publishable state. I also assume there’s a £20 manufacturing and shipping cost to be deducted per book, since in my limited experience as a reviewer and shelf-browser such books tend to be print-on-demand from Lightning Source (look at the very tiny small-print in the very back of the book). Every ebook edition sold, however, would mean about £17 extra profit per book — assuming some of that £17 isn’t passed along as discount offered to the library’s purchasing clerk.

If a telesales lead-generator and initial author handler is given a target of drumming up 75 new book titles per year, as The Guardian‘s article suggests, in the expectation that he only delivers 50, then he’s potentially generating £600,000 profit per year for someone. One suspects his own salary amounts to far less than that.

At that sales/profit ratio might the academic world need to guard against a de facto ‘guaranteed book purchasing’ ring? Perhaps one loosely spread across the world’s libraries and differently configured/staggered for each book title?

Open Research is a free online course, running Monday 14th September – Sunday 11th October 2015.

The Firefox Web browser team has announced “WebExtensions, a new browser extension API”, which should mean that we will soon start to see popular Chrome-only addons ported over to work in Firefox.