QOTD: Les Carr on academic publishing

From Repository Man, Les Carr: Publishing - A One-Word Oxymoron?

Why do they call it "publishing"? Wouldn't it be much more accurate to say "I've just had a paper privatised?"

QOTD: Michael Idinopulos on publishing

From Michael Idinopulos's Transparent Office blog:

I think of this as the dawn of the "Work in Progress" culture. We no longer think that something has to be finished before we let strangers into the conversation.

Zingers from the Tools of Change Keynote

From Stephen Abram's keynote at the Tools of Change conference: Will publishers matter?

• Facebook is the new threat to publishers, not Google.
• University of Alberta library doing all referencing in Facebook, and has 5000 visitors a night in Second Life.
• Syndication is increasingly important. If you're still trying to create a destination site, you're messing up.
• Phone is the dominant global device. Is your content ready?

That is some heady stuff. How are you doing?

QOTD: Danah Boyd on open access publishing

From Danah Boyd: open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals

I vow that this is the last article that I will publish to which the public cannot get access. I am boycotting locked-down journals and I'd like to ask other academics to do the same.

If only all academics, and their institutions, would take such a principled stand we could blow this whole mess wide open. Three cheers Danah!

QOTD: Scott Karp on new media networking

From Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 discussing the Yahoo/Microsoft merger: What Microsoft Buying Yahoo Really Means.

Media use to be about tightly controlled silos — now it’s about loosely affiliated, distributed networks. Legacy business can, potentially, evolve and survive, but only through a radical change in thinking.

QOTD: David Cushman on content production

David Cushman from Faster Future, Why you can't expect business as usual:

It's not just about new ways of making content. It's about new ways of making. Everything.

Nature Precedings

Scientific publications being made available to the public without peer-review. What is the world coming to?

Nature Precedings is a place for researchers to share pre-publication research, unpublished manuscripts, presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and other scientific documents. Submissions are screened by our professional curation team for relevance and quality, but are not subjected to peer review.

Do you have any idea how dangerous this is? Ordinary people might seriously hurt themselves using this material. Where are the control-freaks when we need them?

Science 2.0 and open access

Peter Suber at Open Access News points us to a great read: Scientific Communication and the Dematerialization of Scholarship by Douglas Brown concerning the changes taking place in scientific methodologies and publishing. Here's a taste:

Simultaneously, research practices at the frontier are changing rapidly as scientists and engineers are moving towards a research process of continuous refinement - writing, annotating and revising in near real time using the Internet - a tendency that may be further encouraged by the emergence of new, informal writing platforms and collaborative tools.

Here are links to each of the article sections:

• Introduction
  
• Frontier Research
  
• Towards a Natively Digital Model?
  
• Institutional Repositories and the Future
  

It's been interesting to watch the resistance to these changes within the academy. It's very much an "Empty Quarter" dynamic. Resistance is futile.