Kate Wittenberg, Beyond Google: What Next for Publishing?Chronicle of Higher Education, June 16, 2006 (accessible only to subscribers). Wittenberg is director of EPIC, the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia University. Excerpt:
While we [publishers] have been busy attending conferences, workshops, and seminars on every possible aspect of scholarly communication, information technology, digital libraries, and e-publishing, students have been quietly revolutionizing the discovery and use of information....If "digital natives" are the next audience for our scholarly resources, shouldn't we be thinking about new ways to organize, store, and deliver our content?...As publishers, we are going to have to adapt quickly and creatively if we wish to remain true to our missions as information professionals and yet be relevant to users. Are we ready? Until now we have not only controlled the development of content, but also its discovery and delivery. We can call copyright foul when the books or articles or teaching tools we publish are used in ways we haven't anticipated, and continue business as usual....Or we can think creatively about what comes next for publishing. Until now we have spent most of our energies in rear-guard actions: fighting Google over copyright infringement in its plans to digitize library books, for example. It's time to think "beyond Google."
Comment. Wittenberg set up the problem nicely, and she's right to include collaboration and interactivity as parts of the solution. But she doesn't even mention open access, which is an essential part of the solution. The best way to attract researchers to serious digital scholarship is to offer deep utility and easy access.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/12/2006 08:42:00 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.
