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Publication Model Disruption

January 4, 2010 - 12:24pm — StephenK

Over at the Scholarly Kitchen, a blog of the Society for Scholarly Publishing, the question is asked as to why scientific publishing hasn't been "disrupted" yet. Everybody else saw changes erupt since Sir Tim Berners-Lee let the genie out of the bottle in 1991 so why not the scholarly publications?

(h/t Patricia Anderson)

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January 5, 2010 - 3:18pm — Lee Hadden

Disruption has already happened

Sorry, but the premise is wrong. Specialty scientists today contact each other directly with limited distribution lists of peers. Many articles, especially in fields where only a few scientists around the world are working, are not being published because they don't need to be written to begin with. The scientists pass around notes and comments and get feedback without needing to publish their results- their contributions are already known among the people they want to know about it.

In other fields, where publications are done for resumes and public acclaim, journals are necessary. But for limited areas of science, which in the past had published in specialty scientific journals, this is no longer the paradigm.

You can already see the effects of this in patent arguments, and the inability to recreate a stream of research over several years. Who did what first is even now more open to debate.

R. Lee Hadden (These are my own opinions!)

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