Creating ‘fundamental truth’ | Research Information

peter.suber's bookmarks 2019-01-16

Summary:

"I joined Springer Nature a year ago from bol.com, which I co-founded and led for 20 years.  During my time there, the company developed from a small start-up to being the largest online retail platform for Dutch speaking consumers around the world...

Some of the very core processes of publishing haven’t changed as much as I would have expected and, coming as I did, from a digital process business, this was surprising.

And the degree of cooperation and coordination is also significantly lower than I expected, leaving many opportunities untapped.

But most worrying is the fact that publishers are not seen as partners by some of our stakeholders, but as ‘the enemy’. This is extremely concerning given that there are many fundamental improvements that would create value for the research ecosystem and for which I can see no alternative other than for big publishers to be leading their implementation and playing a pivotal role in their delivery.

there are things we can and should be leading and implementing, both individually within our publishing houses and collectively as the academic publishing industry to create more value for the research ecosystem as a whole.

These include but are not limited to:

  • Helping researchers make their data, protocols and methods open and access the data sets of others. This has the potential to instigate a fundamental step change in enabling researchers to make use of existing information and build on it for the benefit of scientific advancement; 
  • Improving peer review quality and improved process to save time for all involved, including a vastly reduced time between submission and publication;
  • Driving change in the reputation and recognition models and metrics, for authors, researchers, members of our editorial boards and peer reviewers;
  • Publishing negative results and reproducibility studies at scale; and
  • Making usage easy: rather than fighting illegal use, we should create common standards and user-friendly interfaces that make it easy for every legally entitled user to search, discover, and consume the research information they need to advance discoveries....

Without a doubt the biggest challenge facing scholarly publishers over the next 10 years is need to rebuild trust between the research community (authors, researchers, funders, librarians) and publishers ...

A further sentiment I’ve picked up is the negative feeling of dependency; researchers feel they are too dependent on publishers and they don’t like that...."

Link:

https://www.researchinformation.info/interview/creating-%E2%80%98fundamental-truth%E2%80%99

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.interviews oa.springer_nature oa.publishing oa.people

Date tagged:

01/16/2019, 14:13

Date published:

01/16/2019, 09:13