Joachim Engelland

Michael Clarke triggered an interesting discussion on Scholarly Kitchen about Google’s new Sidewiki. I started playing with Sidewiki myself. Kind of fun, I liked it. It has the potential for becoming popular and influential – with all the positive and negative impacts this brings. I am beginning to consider how publishers might make use of it – or cope with it (depending how you see it).

I will be representing the US based publisher Mary Ann Liebert in Europe as of 2010. Alongside with my friends and colleagues Theo and Janet van de Bilt. Important to note: I will continue to provide consulting and business development services also for other companies.

Beginning 2010, Joachim Engelland will represent the US based publisher Mary Ann Liebert in European countries. He joins Theo and Janet van de Bilt in this role and will be focusing on Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the Scandinavian countries, while Janet and Theo concentrate on the other European library segments.

Mary Ann Liebert was first to publish in many important areas of medical research such as HIV/AIDS, the Human Genome, Tissue Engineering, and continues to start journals in emerging areas and support new fields such as Sustainability, Regenerative Medicine, and Astrobiology.

Along with his 15 years of experience in scholarly publishing, Joachim Engelland brings a special expertise in the development of electronic products. For another publisher, he pioneered an integrated multi-product e-platform, and for Mary Ann Liebert, he has managed the development of Videourology, a video-only peer-reviewed journal that provides high quality videos demonstrating and discussing microinvasive techniques in Urology.

Theo and Janet van de Bilt and Joachim Engelland will be at the Frankfurt Book Fair. If you like to set up an appointment, please email us at  

Joachim@engelland.com  or  theo@vandebilt.co.uk

I will be giving a talk on this topic at the upcoming ALPSP conference. The focus will be on books for the academic market – both libraries and individuals. Any ideas, questions or specific interest in this topic? – I am happy to hear from you.
Btw – the talk will be video taped and published on the ALPSP site. You will find a link to it once it’s up.

Zoe Corbyn lists in her Times Higher Education article challenges to contemporary academic comunication and publishing, Yet no surprises or new arguments in there.  It remains difficult to foresee if and how these things will (severely) affect commercial publishers:

• adequateness of the impact factor – or viability and acceptance of any replacement systems
• open access attitude and actual behaviour (among researchers, university managers, funding providers…)
• the further development of PLOS (as a future open access giant – just like Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, ebay… ? How will they react to their  first case of fraud in PLOS…?)

Some of the reader comments I found useful. e.g. the suggestion to publish reviewers’ comments. This could indeed help the reader evaluate the article. And from a publisher point of view: this would probably also help driving usage to the journal, which will again help with subscriptions…

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.

The journal RNA Biology requests from authors to create a Wikipedia entry with a link to the article istself. the entry will be peer reviewd along with the original article befor pushed life to Wikipedia. Here is a sample.

publisher’s benefit: Google ranks Wikipedia entries on top of their search results – thus providing excellent publicity to the original article.

Wikipedia’s benefit; those contributinos are actually peer revied – thus providing the kind of authority that Wikipedia entries usually lack.

I anticipate that this will be copied by other publishers very soon: expecting their authors to help promote their work by writing on Wikipedia.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.

Faszinating eBook experiment with Google Maps mashup: Senghor on the Rocks.

Three quarters of academic libraries and half of public libraries will increase their eBooks collections over next year. This is one of the results of a recent survey by NetLibrary. 

Academic libraries aim at supporting their core readin lists in various subject areas.  Public libraries are mainly interested in fiction – possibly encouraged by the increased availability of mobile reading devices. Audio books are also of interest to 65% of the public libraries.