Chris Anderson, People Power, Wired, July 2006. Excerpt:
There’s...gold in the casual Web droppings we all leave online. Much of the value of Amazon and Netflix comes from their tens of millions of customer reviews. Your click trail on Amazon is used to create better recommendations for those who follow. Your query on Google and the pages that you find relevant give feedback that fine-tunes the search algorithms. The ads you click don’t just boost revenue for Google, they also tell it how much to charge the next advertiser. These companies have found ways to harness the wisdom of the crowd, extracting information that was there all along, just latent and lost.
Comment. On the whole, the nonacademic web is far ahead of the academic web in taking advantage of these tools. One reason is the reluctance of academics to trade in professional or credentialed peer review for democratic or anarchic peer review. But wherever you stand on that question, it should be clear that the nature of peer review isn't the only place where the promise of these tools intersects the academic web. The possibilities for improved impact measurements and recommendation services, to name just two, are real and exciting.
For me, the first and most important way that academics can take advantage of the internet is open access. But after that there are thousands of other ways, large and small, although most of them presuppose OA. Let's not allow our conservatism about peer review to make us conservative about taking full advantage of the internet in ways that don't affect peer review.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/07/2006 10:09:00 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.
