End of a (Print) Era

Wow:

Another storied print magazine is coming to an end in print, and the focus is shifting to online and events: InfoWorld, the weekly magazine owned by IDG, is closing down, and the announcement will come Monday morning, paidContent.org has confirmed.

When I was a cub computing reporter (or thereabouts) on a long-forgotten title called Practical Computing in the 1980s, reading the thick pages of Infoworld was a weekly ritual for me. And now its been blown to bits - literally.

PLoS ONE: Plus One for Science

PLoS ONE, the new way of publishing scientific papers, has gone live. As well as fascinating papers on the Syntax and Meaning of Wild Gibbon Songs, to say nothing of populist numbers like Regulated Polyploidy in Halophilic Archaea, you can also find a sandbox for playing around with the new features of this site. It's obviously premature to say whether this experiment in Web 2.0 science publishing will work, but it certainly deserves to.

The End of the End for Academic Writing

Scholarship never ends. There is never a last word, even about established facts. What we've had up till now in published works are static snapshots. Sure, there may be follow-up articles, second editions and corrections, but each work stands alone as a completed product. I find myself wondering if researchers - and writers - will continue to be content with snapshots when the technical barriers to revision are so low and readers' comfort level with edited online works is growing.

Ergo, we need other ways of publishing - online, wikis etc. Not rocket science, but definitely something of a leap for the academic world. (Via Open Access News.)

Closing Ranks

Talking of Microsoft, I see that my old chums at Reed Elsevier (disclosure: I used to work there a long, long time ago) are cosying up to none other than the same. I particularly enjoyed the following paragraph:

"We provide access to a very large collection of proprietary content to millions of professional users around the world. This includes more than 4.6 billion searchable documents through LexisNexis.com and 6.7 million articles through ScienceDirect,” said Keith McGarr, chief technology officer at Reed Elsevier. “Technology from Microsoft has played, and continues to play, a key role in our ongoing, aggressive online strategy."

What's amusing here is not just the fact that Reed Elsevier is using Microsoft's technology to be "aggressive" - "go on, bite 'is 'ead off" kind of stuff, I presume - but the way the word "proprietary" is added so gratuitously. It's almost as if Reed Elsevier wants to emphasise its close kinship to a certain other proud pusher of the proprietary. And it's rather drole to see this relationship made explicit like this, since half-jokingly I have been calling Reed Elsevier the Microsoft of the open access world for some time.

Digital Libraries - the Ebook

It seems appropriate that a book about digital libraries has migrated to an online version that is freely available. Digital Libraries - for such is the nicely literalist title - is a little long in the tooth in places as far as the technical information is concerned, but very clearly written (via Open Access News).

It also presents things from a librarian's viewpoint, which is quite different from that of a your usual info-hacker. I found Chapter 6, on Economic and legal issues, particularly interesting, since it touches most directly on areas like open access.

Nonetheless, I was surprised not to see more (anything? - there's no index at the moment) about Project Gutenberg. Now, it may be that I'm unduly influenced by an extremely thought-provoking email conversation I'm currently engaged in with the irrepressible Michael Hart, the founder and leader of the project.

But irrespective of this possible bias, it seems to me that Project Gutenberg - a library of some 17,000 ebooks, with more being added each day - is really the first and ultimate digital library (or at least it will be, once it's digitised the other million or so books that are on its list), and deserves to be recognised as such.

Open Access: Books Too

Hitherto, open access has tended to refer to scholarly papers published in journals. This makes the idea of establishing an online "press" devoted to book-length titles particularly interesting.

Of course, online pagination has no real meaning (except in terms of convenient layout), so "long" books are just as easy to produce as "short" papers. In this sense, there's nothing new here. But the move is nonetheless important; let's hope it gain momentum.

Open Access - Get the Facts

A piece that writes very positively about open access's future quotes a survey from the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research (CIBER) that examined academics' attitude to different forms of publishing. According to figures given in a story referred to by the first article, some 96.2% of those surveyed support peer review - the standard academic process whereby a paper is sent to referees for comments on its accuracy. So far, so good.

Except that the headline given on the second site is "Academic authors favour peer review over open access" - as if the two were in opposition. In fact, most open access titles employ peer review, so the 96.2% in favour of it were not expressing any opinion about open access, just about peer review.

However, the second article does quote two other figures: that "nearly half" of the academics surveyed thought that open access would undermine the current system (which requires academic institutions to take out often hugely-expensive subscriptions to journals), and that 41% thought that this was a good thing.

To find out whether this 41% refers to the entire sample, or only to those who thought open access would undermine the old system, I naturally went to the CIBER site in order to find out what the real figures were. It turns out that the 41% refers to the whole sample, not just those who viewed the rise of open access as likely. Among the latter group, more than half were in favour.

The Publishers Association and the International Association of STM Publishers, which sponsored the report, must be pretty gutted by the results that a significant proportion of academics rather like the idea of open access destroying the current system. But not peer review. As Microsoft likes to say, in a rather different context, and with a rather different effect, Get The Facts.

Publish and Be Damned!

The wilful misunderstanding of Google Books by traditional publishers is truly sad to see. They continue to propagate the idea that Google is somehow going to make the entire text of their titles available, whereas in fact it simply wants to index that text, and make snippets available in its search results.

As a an author I welcome this; nothing makes me happier than see that a search for the phrase "digital code" at Google Books brings up my own title as the top hit. The fact that anyone can dip into the book can only increase sales (assuming the book is worth reading, at least). Yes, it might be possible for a gang of conspirators to obtain scans of the entire book if they had enough members and enough time to waste doing so. But somehow, I think it would be easier to buy the book.

Of course, what is really going on here is a battle for control - as is always the case with open technologies. The old-style publishers are fighting a losing battle against new technologies (and open content) by being as obstructive as possible. Instead, they should be spending their energies working out new business models that let them harness the Internet and search engines to make their books richer and more available to readers.

They are bound to lose: the Internet will continue to add information until it is "good enough" for any given use. This may take time, and the mechanisms for doing so still need some work (just look at Wikipedia), but the amount of useful information is only going in one direction. Traditional publishers will cling on to the few titles that offer something beyond this, but the general public will have learned to turn increasingly to online information that is freely available. More importantly, they will come to expect that free information will be there as a matter of course, and will unlearn the habit of buying expensive stuff printed on dead trees.

It is this dynamic that is driving all of the "opens" - open source, open access, open genomics. The availability of free stuff that slowly but inexorably gets better means that the paid stuff will always be superseded at some point. It happened with the human genome data, when the material made available by the public consortium matched that of Celera's subscription service, which ultimately became irrelevant. It is happening with open source, as GNU/Linux is being swapped in at every level, replacing expensive Unix and Microsoft Windows systems. And it will happen with open content.