Impact of Social Sciences – Five Minutes with Lambert Heller: “Do we need an open operating system of science?”

" ... What role do you think publishing companies such as Elsevier will play in science in the future? Publishing companies such as Elsevier and their shareholders will exploit the power of their outdated publishing brands for as long as they can. That’s how a business like that works. What is more worrying, however, is that Elsevier is clever enough to have identified this phenomenon. At conferences, there are open discussions about wanting to become something of an operating system of digital science. This is demonstrated when start-ups such as the reference management service Mendeley or current research information systems such as Pure are snapped up ... And Elsevier is quite right in its assessment: the future does not lie in the traditional journal business, i.e. in artificially restricting access to scientific content and subsequently selling subscriptions. This is the essential question that we must ask ourselves: How open should such an operating system in science be? Should the brand Elsevier operate it or do we need other players and platforms to achieve it?  How would an Elsevier brand operating system differ from other approaches?  First of all it must be said that the start-ups being snapped up by companies such as Elsevier by all means add useful and new elements to the digital information landscape. Let me give you an example: platforms such as Researchgate and Academia.edu are visited by millions of researchers because they are based on the idea of wanting to have a real-time status update by colleagues and fellow researchers – as is the case with Linkedin and Facebook. This need is being addressed by platforms, which is a very good thing.  The question is, however: Is donating all my data to a company such as Researchgate the solution? This is exactly what happens when I upload a paper there, according to their terms and conditions. Is this a sustainable solution? The question is whether, in the case of such a solution, the currently evolving digital commons can be shaped by a wide range of players or whether a 'closed silo' will be created ..."