Tag Archives: Harvard Business Review

Harvard Business Review Argues That It Is Special

Posted on October 22, 2013 by Stephen Francoeur

In light of this being Open Access week, I thought I’d share a story about attempts to restrict the flow of information through excessive monetization and metering. Last week, Joshua Gans, a professor of strategic management, argued in an article at FT.com that the Financial Times should drop the Harvard Business Review (HBR) from its list of journals that is uses to rank MBA and EMBA programs (the number of times a school’s faculty publish in 45 key journals is part of the ranking criteria). Gans suggests that because of the exclusive deal that Harvard Business School Press (HBSP) struck with EBSCO that requires schools to pay an additional course use fee for HBR articles used in classes, that journal is now in a special category of publications that is distinctly different from the other 44 titles that FT uses for its ranking criteria. Gans suggests that HBR is now being treated similarly to the case studies series that HBSP.

The next day, Das Narayandas, a senior associate dean and Executive Education and Publishing at the Harvard Business School, responded on the FT.com site with an article that argued HBR is so special and valuable it was fair to charge extra:

But high-quality information – ideas that have been carefully crafted by authors and editors to make sense to managers and to achieve maximum impact – comes at a cost.

One hopes that other publishers don’t follow suit and argue that they too have journals that are equally special and start striking similarly restrictive deals with aggregators like EBSCO and ProQuest.

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Tech Sharecase, 9 July 2009

Posted on July 9, 2009 by Stephen Francoeur

Attendees

Arthur Downing, Linda Rath, Stephen Francoeur, Rita Ormsby, Frank Donnelly, Louise Klusek

New Accounting Standards Codification

Rita Ormsby showed the various ways to access the new Accounting Standards Codification:

Google OS

Discussed the news about Google’s plan to release its own operating system next year. Louise Klusek noted this article from today’s Wall Street Journal that discussed Google’s strategy to compete with Microsoft.

Bing

We compared searches in Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, to those in Google and found some ways that it offered improved results for certain kinds of searches.

Compare “starbucks” in Bing to “starbucks” in Google, for example. Note that Bing automatically clusters results into topics in ways that may be useful (Google just offers a vanilla list of results).

FriendFeed

I discussed how I use FriendFeed to publish from all my web services that I use (Facebook, Twitter, blogs where I am an author, Flickr, YouTube, etc.) in one location that others can subscribe to and add comments. I highlighted the way that I use it for social recommendation of recent articles and blog posts and for submitting requests for help or advice to the librarians and others who subscribe to me in FriendFeed.

Harvard Business Review Curtailing Deep Linking to Articles in Business Source Premier

A number of blogs have commented lately on the Harvard Business School Press’ terms of service that forbid free linking to Harvard Business Review articles in Business Source Premier. It was suggested that maybe the journal may be thinking of moving its content exclusively to its own platform much as Institutional Investor did. We also discussed the way that most database vendors are trying to protect their brands by controlling the way that screenshots of their products are published (as in the case of a tutorial created by a library).

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