Publishing

By definition, businesses and organizations need to keep their customers or users satisfied, which is why you don't typically see editors taking potshots at their readers in the pages of their publications.

The Society of Architectural Historians says you don't just read its new online journal; you experience it.

Scholars turn on one of their favorite blogs, alleging ethical and copyright violations.

If libraries do not seriously rethink their role in the lives of researchers, they could come to be seen more as resource purchasers than as research collaborators, according to a report released today by the nonprofit group Ithaka S+R.

Many a successful journal article is published not in the publication where the author first submitted, but in another one, following rejection from the first. This trickle-down publication process helps get work reviewed and disseminated, but it also means long waits for authors, who can’t start the process with a second journal until they have been rejected by or withdrawn a submission from the first.

Think of it as Oprah’s Book Club for scholars.

Academics may cringe at the comparison, but that is essentially the idea behind the Oxford Bibliographies Online: Someone you trust telling you what, among endless options, you should read -- in classics, criminology, Islamic studies, social work, or any of the other 50 areas of study the Oxford University Press plans to add to the new online reference guide by the end of 2015.

Southern Methodist University is suspending the operations of its university press -- a move that has angered faculty members and other supporters of the institution's publishing arm.

With students, parents and politicians all frustrated by high textbook costs, recent years have seen many innovations as well as state and federal legislation. Much of the latter has focused on requirements that involve providing information so students and professors can make sound choices.

ORLANDO — In a series of moves that could give a boost to an e-textbook industry that has been treading water for years, Blackboard announced Wednesday that it is partnering with a major publisher and two major e-textbook vendors to make it easy for professors and students to assign and access e-textbooks and other digital materials directly through its popular learning-management system.

For 30 years, starting in the spring of 1977, Steven Strogatz maintained an occasional correspondence with his high school calculus teacher, Don Joffray. During that time, both Strogatz and Joffray experienced great changes in their lives -- from professional successes to family tragedies -- yet their letters focused almost entirely on mathematics, rarely mentioning personal matters at all.