RE: Olivia Judson

["Ian Russell" <ian.russell@cytherean.co.uk>]

I get pretty disheartened when I read about the lack of 
innovation in scholarly publishing.

I really, truly, believe that this is a complete fallacy.

In little more than a decade, the vast majority of journals 
(according to the latest ALPSP Scholarly Publishing Practice 
survey 96.1% of STM journals and 86.5% of HSS journals) are 
available online; many publishers have completely digitized their 
backfiles; we have seen the emergence of new business models, 
both for author-side payment and evolution of the subscription 
model; we have seen the implementation of online submission and 
peer review processes and systems; we are now publishing audio, 
video and supplementary data sets alongside research articles; 
publishers are linking primary research to underlying data; 
publication times have decreased dramatically; cost per page and 
per article are also generally decreasing; publishers have made 
great use of outsourcing and other business strategies to 
minimize costs and maximise service; we are seeing the emergence 
of data and text mining; access to scholarly material has never 
been greater or more convenient; we have seen any number of 
experiments linking scholarly communication with 'web 2.0' 
technologies; we are seeing experimentation and even early 
implementation of semantic web technology... the list goes on and 
on and on!

At the same time, the scholarly communication system is serving 
ever greater numbers of researchers publishing more and more 
material.

I do not believe for one moment that publishers are disconnected 
from their readers and authors.  Reality could not be further 
from the truth.

Of course, some authors, readers, librarians and other 
stakeholders will also innovate and there is nothing new in that; 
it goes back at least to 1665 and to Oldenburg.

What possible justification can there be for the assertion that 
innovation in scholarly publishing is slow and what on Earth more 
could the publishing industry be doing?

Ian Russell, ALPSP

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Armbruster, Chris
Sent: 07 January 2009 03:41
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: Olivia Judson

Staying with the metaphor of the car: It would seem that 
scientists have been busy designing new engines (e.g. interactive 
peer review) if not new cars (e.g. new types of publishing and 
overlay services related to metrics, mining etc.). Maybe the 
defining feature of our current era is that researchers are doing 
these new designs for themselves and that established publishers 
are very much *disconnected*...meaning that researchers are doing 
this by themselves...?

I say *maybe* because I would like to read the observations of 
others on this issue and also on the subsequent conjecture that 
this *disconnect* pretty much explains why innovation in 
scholarly publishing/communication is lagging/slow.

Chris Armbruster