Is Scientific Publishing About To Be Disrupted? Michael Nielsen @michael_nielsen STM Conference,...
-
Upload
brian-carlson -
Category
Documents
-
view
216 -
download
0
Transcript of Is Scientific Publishing About To Be Disrupted? Michael Nielsen @michael_nielsen STM Conference,...
Is Scientific PublishingAbout To BeDisrupted?
Michael Nielsen@michael_nielsen
http://michaelnielsen.org/blogSTM Conference, October 2009
Kongo Gumi
578 CE
Prince Shotoku
Shitenno-Ji Temple
almost 1,500 years
2005:100+ employees
70 million $ revenue
Masakazu Kongo40th generation
2006:Liquidation
Purchased by Takamatsu
As an independent entity,Kongo Gumi no longer exists
How is it that large, powerfulorganizations, with access to vast
sums of money, and many talented,hardworking people, can
simply disappear?
most interesting when an entire industry is disrupted
Data General
None of these companies exist
CD Sales
Napster founded
Firstquarter2009
First part of talkWhy these disruptions happenHow we can recognize themSecond part of talk
Scientific publishing is in the (very)early days of such a disruption
Common explanations ofdisruption1. The people in charge are stupid.
Why couldn’t the record companies see things coming…
Napster
iTunes
Last.fm
pre-empt them by doingsomething similar first
2. The people in charge are malevolent.
stupidity and malevolencesometimes play a role…
…it’s a mistake to base an explanation on these factors.
underlying structural reasons cause the failure
If you look at the newspapersand record companies andsee stupid and malevolent
people…
But if disruption can destroy
then it can destroy anybody
Why are the top blogs thriving financially, while the
newspapers are dying?
news parasites
TechCrunch
Top 100 blogs in the world
Started in 2005
arguably the best reportingin the technology industry
TechCrunch is thriving
The New York Times is wilting
Operating income down 50% first quarter
TechCrunch’s operatingcosts are far lower, per word
depressing the price of advertising
Increased supply of ad space
Old supply of published material
ad space
decreased price
there’s a limited amount thenewspapers can do to makethemselves cheaper to run
~ $100s per photo
~ $10 / photo
TechCrunch isn’t being any smarterthan the newspapers
quality photography can help establisha superior newspaper brand
worth $$$
makes business senseto spend ~ $100s / photo
Organizational architecture
(Diff colours = diff skills)
Most newspapers usea very similar architecture
Compete with small variations
Good photographersare worth every cent
An opportunity for anew type of organization
New technology (internet)
radically different human skills
radically different structure
No staff photographerNo office (until recently)
No print room
no wonder it’s lower cost
What can you do?
destroy morale of all your staff
stir up the Unions
give a competitive advantageto your newspaper competitors
still be paying far more, per word, than TechCrunch
product will be no more competitive
new optimum could not have existed 20 years ago
you can’t get there without going through the valley
incremental actions wouldbe hell on a newspaper
locked in
comparable quality
higher price
~ $100s / photo
entirely sensible business decision
NOT
Standard Org.Architecture
New Org.Architecture
Radicallydifferent skills
& structure
Near-impossible to get from onearchitecture to the other
Easier to start over
Change is harder even than I’ve said
forces which suppress change
Large, complex structures can only lastwith forces that preserve that structure
Organizational immune system
good thing
When major changes are needed, the immune system will attack
those changes
attacked from within
attacked by their competitors
Only a company outside theindustry could have done it
AndrewRosenthal
Classic immune response
Deep commitment to quality journalism
values which have madethe New York Times great
The NYT can keep itsPulitzer Prizes
the last people to know an industry is dead are
the people in it
internalized the values, normsand collective knowledge
immune response is strongest
If a person inside an industry needs tofrequently explain why it’s not dead,
they’re almost certainly wrong
How can you tell if an industry is about to be disrupted?
fundamental problem is thatit’s hard to recognize the early
stages of disruption
newspapers laughed at thenotion of online news and ad sites
as competitors just a few years ago
serve a similar basic need
craigslist
craigslist
different org. architecture
People outside the newspaperindustry were willing to bettheir own money on them
Most such startups die
That’s how the new industrylearns what organizational
architectures work
But if even a few survive, theincumbents are in big trouble
lot more room for improvement
What’s this got to do withscientific publishing?
TodayEditorial
Co-ordinationDistribution
Production companies
10-20 yearsTechnology companies
Sales & marketing
Not just that they’ll use technology
Nor that they’ll have a large IT staff
technology-driven
their core competency andcore way of adding value is technological innovation
key decisions are being madeby people whose background
is technology
Didn’t people already predictsomething like this with
preprint archives?
Today, there is a flourishingecology of startups
Acquired by Royal Society of Chemistry
many of the same people as Last.fm
science blogs
easy to miss impact on research
most science blogs focus onoutreach
Tim Gowers
open sourcemathematics
entirely in the open
37 days
27 people
800 comments
170,000 words
Gowers: “this processis to normal research as
driving is to pushing a car”
4 of the 42 living Fieldsmedallists have blogs
hundreds of research blogs
Some of the world’s topscientists are spending manyhundreds of hours per year
on their blogs
open notebook science
Pioneered by chemistsJean-Claude Bradley and
Cameron Neylon
Tobias Osborne
Garrett Lisi
Steve Koch
Second sign of move from productioncompany to technology company
Changing nature of information
static entity
add value through content,production and distribution
online
cost of distribution, production and content have dropped dramatically
information is...
waking up
coming alive
people who add most value areno longer the people who doproduction and distribution
technology people
programmers
Look at where profits are migratingin other media industries
profound technical ability
How many scientific publishersare run by people who know…
…the differenceb/w INNER JOIN
and OUTER JOIN… what an A/B test is?
… how to set up a Hadoop cluster?
myriad of services to develop
many are being considered by startups
Not difficult, technically
The Amazon algorithmis public (Linden, Smith and York,IEEE Internet Computing, 2003)
PageRank
personalized PageRank
personalized search
personalized recommendations
Google doesn’t use it
too computationally intensive
… even for Google, onbillions of pages
but on the scientific literature?
Not yet done
Automatic translation
Full-text searchGood relevancy and importance ranking
RSS feeds
Spell checkingSynonyms
Alerting services
Analytics
Data miningInference of emerging areas
Factual inferenceOpen API
not yet widely adopted by scientiststrivial reasons
collaboration platforms will emerge
Timestamped
LaTeX integration
Version history
Citable
Integrate naturally with platformslike wordpress.org
Where will they be in 10, 20 years time?
Someone needs to do the same for science
Citable
Permanent
Versioned and timestamped
Searchable
Huge opportunities
Technology leads
Most ideas will fail
The people who succeedwill be those with the deepest
understanding, not the deepest pockets
Difficult for publishersto get involved
If not them, it will be someone else
Thankyouhttp://michaelnielsen.org/blog/?p=629
http://michaelnielsen.org/blog@michael_nielsen