Alexandre Linhares, A modest (billion-dollar) proposal, The Human Intuition Project, October 6, 2007. Linhares is the Director-General of the Brazilian Chapter of the Club of Rome. Excerpt:
Imagine the following scenario. A secretive meeting, years ago, when Apple's Steve Jobs, the benevolent dictator, put in place a strategy to get into the music business....I have no idea how that meeting went, but one thing is for sure: many people afterwards must have been back-stabbing Jobs, and mentioning "the music business? We're going to sell music? This guy has totally lost it."
Having said that, I'd like to make a modest, billion-dollar, proposal, to the likes of Adobe, Yahoo, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, and whomever else might be up to the task.
Think about science publishing....
The economics of science publishing is completely crazy for this day and age....
[T]echnology has forever changed the economics of the scientific publishing business, and it's high time for someone like Jobs to step forward.
Adobe Buzzword is specially suited to do this. Most scientific publishers (Elsevier, Springer) and societies (IEEE, ACM, APA, APS, INFORMS) have just one or two typesetting styles for papers. I imagine a version of Buzzword which carries only the particular typesetting style(s) of the final published document, and researchers would already prepare those manuscripts ready for publication....A submit button would submit the papers for evaluation, either to a journal or a conference. Referees could make comments and annotation on the electronic manuscript....
Buzzword is just my favorite option....Other options could be desktop processors (MsWord, Pages, OpenOffice, etc)....
Now, why would the people in Adobe, Yahoo, SUN, IBM, Microsoft, Google, or others actually want to do a thing like that? There are two reasons. The first one is goodwill, the second one is money....
One crucial point is for the platform to be freely accessible to all. But you can do that, and still block the googlebot, the yahoobot, and all others "bots", but your own. Let's say, for instance, that Microsoft does something of the sort. In some years time, not only it gets the goodwill of graduate students who are studying papers published by science.microsoft.org (as opposed to hey-sucker-pay-thirty-bucks-for-your-own-paper-Elsevier), but also the way to search for such information would be only through that website. As we all know, advertising is moving online: according to a recent study, the last year saw "$24 billion spent on internet advertising and $450 billion spent on all advertising". Soon we'll reach US$100 Billion/year in advertising on the web. And imagine having a privileged position in the eyeballs of graduate-educated people, from medicine to science to economics to business to engineering to history....
Google might want to do it just to preempt some other company from blocking the googlebot to get its hands on valuable scientific research. Microsoft, the Dracula of the day, certainly needs the goodwill, and it could help it to hang on to the MS-Word lock in. Maybe Amazon would find this interesting--fits nicely with their web storage and search dreams. Yahoo would have the same reason as Google....
Comments
I have no thoughts on Linhares' particular proposal --basically, a publisher-ready stylesheet and submit button for author apps, a platform to receive submissions and coordinate unpaid peer reviewers, open access compromised only by exclusive search indexing, and ads on search pages-- except that we're making good progress toward uncompromised OA without it.
But his proposal raises a larger and more important question. I'd put it this way. Journal publishing is dysfunctional and unsustainable in its dominant form. Open access allows wider distribution and lower costs at the same time. Tools to produce it, services to exploit it, and business models to support it are all multiplying fast. There may be a trajectory in all this activity (and I believe there is), but at least there is ferment. The ferment smells like readiness. Now: Is journal publishing susceptible to a sudden transformation from an unexpected player using a killer app and business plan? Is there a Steve Jobs of journal publishing ready to act?
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/06/2007 11:21:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
