Detours and Diversions - Do Open Access Publishers Face New Barriers? - The Scholarly Kitchen

lterrat's bookmarks 2017-05-31

Summary:

"Now there’s a new wrinkle — the Internet has changed in the intervening years. These changes have introduced diversions and detours that aren’t based on paywalls but which can prevent OA content from reaching an audience. These changes have put non-neutral intermediaries on the discovery path, and these intermediaries divert readers without leaving a trace.

Thinking solely about transactional paywalls as the main barriers to OA content success no longer reflects how the Internet is run and governed, and by whom. New barriers are coming from major commercial intermediaries wielding algorithms that drive search engines and social media. Other barriers come from state-sponsored, industry-sponsored, and hacker-abetted propaganda that uses these intermediaries to spread misinformation faster than scientific research can possibly respond.

Publishers who rely solely on non-commercial digital distribution seem particularly vulnerable to being confounded by these new intermediaries — Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others with click-based advertising models and infrastructure-level presences.

Passive information purveyance faces tough odds when pitted against active information placement by technology-savvy commercial entities working 24/7 to gain any advantage they can. Gold OA, predicated on selling pre-publication services, doesn’t naturally create the commercial incentives to push content placement and delivery after publication. Subsequently, OA publisher investments in usage data monitoring, search engine optimization, and sophisticated social media monitoring is sometimes lacking."

Link:

https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/05/31/detours-and-diversions-do-open-access-publishers-face-new-barriers/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » lterrat's bookmarks

Tags:

Date tagged:

05/31/2017, 11:57

Date published:

05/31/2017, 07:57