Q: Does the Internet threaten traditional STM publishing?
A: Open access, where authors publish their results for free on the Internet, is a very interesting trend. If it were to really take off, then it would have a huge effect on publishers. Whether agents would disappear too, or whether they would still have a role, remains to be seen. Open access would still require a huge amount of administration, which the researchers are unlikely to want to do themselves, so this is where agents could help.
Although there is very little volume available in open access at the moment, it is starting to see some success in medicine and some other disciplines.
The basic value that publishers give to papers is the peer review process, which guarantees quality. Open access does not have a peer review process embedded in the same way, so there is currently not a similar guarantee of quality. However, if groups of scientists could find a solution to this issue, then it could change the industry hugely.
(PS: Is van Amerongen really unaware that OA journals have been performing peer review for more than 15 years? As of today, the DOAJ lists 1,086 peer-reviewed OA journals. What do investors think when they see a CEO make this kind of elementary mistake?)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/13/2004 01:03:00 PM.
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.
