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Saved by 27 people (-1 private), first by anonymouse user on 2009-06-29


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Five years ago, most newspaper editors would have laughed at the idea that blogs might one day offer serious competition. The minicomputer companies laughed at the early personal computers. New technologies often don’t look very good in their early stages, and that means a straightup comparison of new to old is little help in recognizing impending dispruption. That’s a problem, though, because the best time to recognize disruption is in its early stages.

Highlighted by joel

An early sign of impending disruption is when there’s a sudden flourishing of startup organizations serving an overlapping customer need (say, news), but whose organizational architecture is radically different to the conventional approach. That means many people outside the old industry (and thus not suffering from the blinders of an immune response) are willing to bet large sums of their own money on a new way of doing things. That’s exactly what we saw in the period 2000-2005, with organizations like Slashdot, Digg, Fark, Reddit, Talking Points Memo, and many others. Most such startups die. That’s okay: it’s how the new industry learns what organizational architectures work, and what don’t. But if even a few of the startups do okay, then the old players are in trouble, because the startups have far more room for improvement.

Highlighted by joel

My claim is that in ten to twenty years, scientific publishers will be technology companies [3]

Highlighted by takuya514

By this, I don’t just mean that they’ll be heavy users of technology, or employ a large IT staff. I mean they’ll be technology-driven companies in a similar way to, say, Google or Apple. That is, their foundation will be technological innovation, and most key decision-makers will be people with deep technological expertise. Those publishers that don’t become technology driven will die off.

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What I will do instead is draw your attention to a striking difference between today’s scientific publishing landscape, and the landscape of ten years ago. What’s new today is the flourishing of an ecosystem of startups that are experimenting with new ways of communicating research, some radically different to conventional journals. Consider Chemspider, the excellent online database of more than 20 million molecules, recently acquired by the Royal Society of Chemistry. Consider Mendeley, a platform for managing, filtering and searching scientific papers, with backing from some of the people involved in Last.fm and Skype. Or consider startups like SciVee (YouTube for scientists), the Public Library of Science, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, vibrant community sites like OpenWetWare and the Alzheimer Research Forum, and dozens more. And then there are companies like Wordpress, Friendfeed, and Wikimedia, that weren’t started with science in mind, but which are increasingly helping scientists communicate their research. This flourishing ecosystem is not too dissimilar from the sudden flourishing of online news services we saw over the period 2000 to 2005.

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Let’s look up close at one element of this flourishing ecosystem: the gradual rise of science blogs as a serious medium for research. It’s easy to miss the impact of blogs on research, because most science blogs focus on outreach. But more and more blogs contain high quality research content. Look at Terry Tao’s wonderful series of posts explaining one of the biggest breakthroughs in recent mathematical history, the proof of the Poincare conjecture. Or Tim Gowers recent experiment in “massively collaborative mathematics”, using open source principles to successfully attack a significant mathematical problem. Or Richard Lipton’s excellent series of posts exploring his ideas for solving a major problem in computer science, namely, finding a fast algorithm for factoring large numbers. Scientific publishers should be terrified that some of the world’s best scientists, people at or near their research peak, people whose time is at a premium, are spending hundreds of hours each year creating original research content for their blogs, content that in many cases would be difficult or impossible to publish in a conventional journal. What we’re seeing here is a spectacular expansion in the range of the blog medium. By comparison, the journals are standing still.

Highlighted by takuya514

If you doubt this, look at where the profits are migrating in other media industries. In music, they’re migrating to organizations like Apple. In books, they’re migrating to organizations like Amazon, with the Kindle. In many other areas of media, they’re migrating to Google: Google is becoming the world’s largest media company. They don’t describe themselves that way (see also here), but the media industry’s profits are certainly moving to Google. All these organizations are run by people with deep technical expertise. How many scientific publishers are run by people who know the difference between an INNER JOIN and an OUTER JOIN? Or who know what an A/B test is? Or who know how to set up a Hadoop cluster? Without technical knowledge of this type it’s impossible to run a technology-driven organization. How many scientific publishers are as knowledgeable about technology as Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, or Larry Page?

Highlighted by takuya514

When new technologies are being developed, the organizations that win are those that aggressively take risks, put visionary technologists in key decision-making positions, attain a deep organizational mastery of the relevant technologies, and, in most cases, make a lot of mistakes. Being wrong is a feature, not a bug, if it helps you evolve a model that works: you start out with an idea that’s just plain wrong, but that contains the seed of a better idea. You improve it, and you’re only somewhat wrong. You improve it again, and you end up the only game in town.

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The only major examples I know of are Nature Publishing Group (with Nature.com) and the Public Library of Science.

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Polymath Project

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The data web: Where are the services making it as simple and easy for scientists to publish data as it to publish a journal paper or start a blog? A few scientific publishers are taking steps in this direction. But it’s not enough to just dump data on the web. It needs to be organized and searchable, so people can find and use it. The data needs to be linked, as the utility of data sets grows in proportion to the connections between them. It needs to be citable. And there needs to be simple, easy-to-use infrastructure and expertise to extract value from that data. On every single one of these issues, publishers are at risk of being leapfrogged by companies like Metaweb, who are building platforms for the data web.

Highlighted by takuya514

Being wrong is a feature, not a bug

Highlighted by gavstrik

Conclusion: I’ve presented a pessimistic view of the future of current scientific publishers. Yet I hope it’s also clear that there are enormous opportunities to innovate, for those willing to master new techonologies, and to experiment boldly with new ways of doing things. The result will be a great wave of innovation that changes not just how scientific discoveries are communicated, but also accelerates the way scientific discoveries are made.

Highlighted by takuya514