Re: Homer Simpson at the NIH (renaissance?)

["adam hodgkin" <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com>]

Certainly, Joe is replying in good faith, but my point is that he is
missing something.

I was not trying to suggest that the music industries challenges 
are the same as those faced by the publishing industry. Of course 
not. The point is that there are some similarities, and the 
similarities and the differences are instructive. I would partly 
agree with Joe that it would have been good for both industries 
if they had established effective R&D programs -- but I would NOT 
put it this way. If they had had R&D programs, in the strict 
sense, they would have hoped to be effective in the way that 
Intel's or Microsoft's R&D programs were effective (ie not really 
much use at all in these circumstances -- though maybe coming up 
with innovations that we all aplaud. And the STM publishers did, 
after all, come up with CrossRef -- well done).

Much more important than deploying an R&D budget is having an 
open-ness to innovative business models and the underlying goals 
of the whole process. To do this you need to be prepared to throw 
away the rule back -- and try a completely different apprroach. 
This is why I, like Joe Esposito, admire the efforts of BMC (or 
Hindawi). There you have traditional STM publishers trying to see 
how the OA wave can work to the benefit of science publishing, 
and of course to the benefit of scientific research.

Getting back to the challenge and the threat. Traditional 
publishers do sense that their traditional copyright position is 
under enormous threat. The threat is coming not from Napster, but 
from Google (Google Book Search IS perceived as a big threat by 
publishers) and from scientists and researchers who will continue 
to find innovative and unorthodox ways of publicising and 
publishing their research. A very great deal of scientific 
publishing is now done by organisations and publishers that the 
traditional STM publishers do not recognise as publishers (NLM, 
EMBL, ArXiv etc), but they are serving science with a publishing 
function and on the whole responding to the technological 
opportunities with more flexibility than traditional publishers.

I enjoyed re-reading Joe Esposito's First Monday piece 
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_8/esposito/ And the 
analogies he there draws between the challenges facing the 
telephone companies and traditional media are important, at least 
as relevant as the music industry comparisons. And they can be 
developed further. The Skype-like challenge, may well become a 
tough nut for tradtional STM publshers. When peer-to-peer systems 
work well for scientific researchers and their publication needs, 
the traditonal paper publication system will be side-lined. Some 
disruptive technological developments of that kind could well 
impact journal publishing in the next few years.

Adam

On 8/28/07, Joseph J. Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com> wrote:
> Adam,
>
> I reply in good faith and with no sleight of hand.  I am not 
> aware of any "retreat" from my earlier views, which I 
> summarized a few years ago in "The Devil You Don't Know" 
> (http://firstmonday.org).
>
> By the "system" I mean the sum of the materials budgets at 
> academic libraries, which, barring war or a total collapse of 
> the international credit markets, are likely to be modestly 
> larger in absolute, nominal dollars in 5 years than they are 
> today.  All of the growth, and probably some of the base as 
> well, is likely to be garnered by the largest publishers.
>
> I agree that the needs of science are not fully served by the 
> current forms of scholarly communications.  I also believe that 
> most (NOT all) open access schemes are a step backward.  I 
> continue to hope that BioMedCentral, among other services, 
> proves to be a huge success, as it is entirely non-parasitic.
>
> As for the analogy to the music market, I don't know why you 
> would want to present that.  The music industry was assaulted 
> with massive violations of copyright.  Copyright violations of 
> scholarly material are negligible in comparison.
>
> For the record (sigh for the inadvertent pun):  both the music 
> and the publishing industries would be facing far better 
> prospects if they had long had a program, represented by 
> significant R&D budgets, to experiment with new media forms. 
> Astonishing that Napster should have been created by a kid and 
> not Warner Music or that Paul Ginsparg should have developed 
> what the large journals publishers should have developed a 
> decade earlier.