Predicting the Present

"As an aside, I should mention that data-mining gives a different meaning to the term “disintermediation.” We always are hearing that the Internet will disintermediate publishers or that the Internet will disintermediate libraries. But data-mining disintermediates authors, not publishers; the algorithm does the creative work. And as we increasingly move to the “Internet of things,” where machines are connected to the Internet expressly to communicate with other machines, we are disintermediating readers as well. So perhaps this is another scenario: publishing by machines for machines. I wonder who does the peer review and whether the NIH will demand that these new publications be deposited in an open access repository...."