Re: Olivia Judson

[lesliechan@rogers.com]

Another perspective is that most, if not all, the innovations 
identified by Ian Russell took place outside of the publishing 
industry first.  Some of the innovations were then adopted by the 
publishers and their adoption were mostly driven by users demand. 
The key driver behind most publishing innovations is of course 
the Web and the true "hidden revolution" is Open Access. If it 
were up to commercial publishers, the web would never have been 
built, and we would not be talking about Google, Wikipedia and 
2.0...

Leslie Chan
University of Toronto Scarborough

________________________________
From: Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Sent: Thursday, January 8, 2009 5:02:54 PM
Subject: RE: Olivia Judson

I agree: any objective analysis of changes in the publishing
industry would have to conclude that the pace of change and
innovation over the past two decades has been the greatest since
the time of Gutenberg.  For university presses, I would mention
that the use of digital printing technology to solve the #1
problem in the industry--slow-moving inventory that results in
problems for cash flow--has been nothing less than what John
Thompson, in his "Books in the Digital Age," called a "hidden
revolution." Those outside the industry can perhaps be excused
for not understanding just how much has been going on. I've been
in publishing for 40 years, and the last 20 have seen a great
deal more innovation and change than the previous 20 did by far.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


>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