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My lab:
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Scholarly publishers feel the heat, frantically struggling to preserve their threatened business model. More and more it seems they may be going the way of the music industry into irrelevance, when it would be so easy to embrace new technology and survive. Here are two technically easy things which would save academic publishing:

  • Agree on industry-wide, open standards for interoperability and re-use. With such standards, we would be able to have single-click submissions without reformatting. Write paper, pick journal and hit 'submit', that's it. With such standards, the technical obstacles for an actually usable scholarly search technology would be removed. Such technology would allow the development of IT-assisted, smart alert tools which aid researchers in stayng on top of their literature by suggesting only relevant publications. With such standards, the pernicious ranking of journals would stop, as article-level metrics would be easily available (either from publishers or via open APIs).
  • Get rid of subscriptions by offering institutions (i.e., libraries) gold OA deals for their subscription funds (not that I personally would like that, but given the stranglehold publishers currently have on libraries, it would work). PLoS and BMC show that it can work financially.

Those two changes alone would eliminate many of the most egregious shortcomings of the scholarly literature today and thus placate the vast majority of people currently pushing for publishing reform, in effect deflating the entire movement. And yet, I'd bet neither will happen.
Posted on Wednesday 06 March 2013 - 10:00:35 comment: 2
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Comments
JCachat posted on06 Mar 13: 16:25:
Guest


Bjorn - A very relevant, and concisely stated post - well done. I am curious if you or anyone from your lab will be attending #btPDF2? http://www.force11.org/beyondthepdf2 - as these issues are center front.

Julien Colomb and I have also been discussing the trajectory database project (https://www.researchgate.net/post/An_open_database_for_trajectory_data_from_the_lab_how) and many members of the NIF team will be at btPDF - it would be great to have a chance to talk about both issues.

bjoern posted on06 Mar 13: 17:15:
Comments: 322


I'm aware of the #btPDF meetings, but my travel schedule is so tight these days that the only additional travel I can justify to my family is if I get invited, unfortunately. The meetings I go to for my research are the only ones I have the luxury to attend without invitation, and even those I have to miss sometimes.

Julien has sent me the researchgate discussion and the NIF option looks splendid! We'll have a meeting this or next week with a new collaborator on this project and once we have set a course there, I'll talk to our library here which have promised to do most of the infrastructure support. When these details are sorted out, I'd like to see how we can integrate what we have with NIF.
Or do you suggest a different route?


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