What it means to be Bold in Science Publishing

Science publishers such as Elsevier and Springer are not usually known for their forward looking technology and business practices. However, with the near demise of their counterparts in the newspaper business, many are seeing the writing on the wall. Clearly, there are several fundamental forces that have already significantly affected general publishing and are going to put significant amount of pressure on scientific publishers' revenue streams in the coming years.

The rise of the internet allows extremely cheap publishing and distribution of information. In the real world, these forces have led to the rise of Blogs, Wikis and other publishing platforms that have decimated the newspapers by fragmenting the marketplace and significantly decreasing readership of general purpose publications such as the New York times. The information explosion precipitated by decreases in publishing cost has put a significant premium on finding relevant information. This results in the emergence of portals like Google and Yahoo whose sole business revolves around separating junk. There are also science publisher specific changes such as digitization of manuscripts into .pdf formats, the subsequent shift to getting manuscripts online, and the difficulties in extracting semantic information from scientific papers which makes monetization through online ad advertising extremely challenging.

The fact that their constituency is also very conservative has allowed science publishers to fare better than their general-purpose counterparts. However, with the massive failure of print newspapers, even the scientific publishers are taking notice and taking action. Nature, for example, has been coming out with a steady stream of online me-too services such as the reference manager Connotea and the Nature Network (social network for scientists). Even Elsevier has started a new Grand Challenge where they challenge participants to show them the way that publishing will look in the future. The winners this year are a team from EMBL who came up with an markup dictionary. The tool (called Reflect) has a direct parallel in the real world with Answers.com.

The bubble years have seen the rise and subsequent fall of many scientific portals, lab-notebooks and other online services. These have never garnered much popularity with the scientists and all have fallen by the wayside. Judging from the presenters at the BioIT World Expo, this is the beginning of Science Web 2.0 with many new offerings in the same arenas of portals, lab notebooks and aggregators.

I am sure that most of these companies have studied the failure of their forebearers. So why have the initiatives been met with limited success in the academic world? I think that no one really knows the answer to that question fully. I am sure that many believe that science has changed in the last decade and that the time is right now. Another part of it is that academia is not-for-profit so it moves generally slower in adopting new technologies.

However, I believe that the problem is much more transcendent and fundamental. The fact is that nobody has found a solution that is specific to science and addresses the problems faced by scientists in their day-to-day lives. The services offered by these companies and publishers have been mostly rip-offs from other successful businesses, which have very different and specific dynamics that are not present in science. Thus, I submit that the future of science publishing, like its origins, will be built by scientists for scientists.