(bellinghamherald.com): Last month's news that the giant Borders bookstore chain had collapsed, taking 400 stores and 11,000 employees with it, leaving behind only a couple of hundred millions of dollars in IOUs to publishers, was for many the seventh sign of an impending apocalypse: for bookstores, for the art of reading, for the very concept of literacy.But rather than the first steps of a funeral cortege, the death of Borders is really just the first little dip on a wildly careening roller coaster ride for the people who write, publish, buy and sell books.
(ubergizmo.com): It looks like eBooks are one of the few things that are still selling well in the US despite the country's current depressing economy. According to BookStats, a company that studies the US publishing industry, eBooks have been doing really well. Sales of eBooks made up 6.4% of all book sales in 2010, with the number expected to grow even more this year.
(medpagetoday.com): The peer review process employed by Type 1 medical journals uses secret, anonymous peer reviewers working behind an opaque shield hiding clueless and spineless editors who may use either no reviewers, or a few cronies, or those reviewers known to be opposed or known to be in favor of some medical theory, hypothesis, study, test, product, or procedure. As such, the results of the entire review process may be rigged by any of that cast of journal decisionmakers, known collectively as "editors."
(chronicle.com): Universities have been struggling for years with the problem of researchers who let industry-financed ghostwriters draft biased summaries of their work for publication in medical journals. They're now getting some blunt advice on how to stop it, including from perhaps the most qualified experts: the ghostwriters themselves..
(fortnightlyreview.co.uk): Peer review in scholarly publishing, in one form or another, has always been regarded as crucial to the reputation and reliability of scientific research. In recent years there have been an increasing number of reports and articles assessing the current state of peer review. In view of the importance of evidence-based scientific information to government, it seemed appropriate to undertake a detailed examination of the current peer-review system as used in scientific publications.
