PeerJ: Silicon Valley Culture Enters Academic Publishing

abernard102@gmail.com 2012-06-15

Summary:

“Something very innovative has arrived again from Silicon Valley, but it isn’t technology... And if we cut through the formulaic journalism cobbled together from press-releases and old recycled material, this has really nothing to do with open access, Elsevier’s profits, or boycotts. This post is about PeerJ; not about how its founders wish to make the world a better place through open access publishing, but what their new venture says about the changing values of academic publishing... Tradition is also what explains most academic publishing. Remember, I’m not talking about technology here: the publishing technology that PeerJ is using is available to every other publisher irrespective of where they are located. I’m talking about the culture of publishing, and the culture of publishing for most academic publishers is one of tradition. Tradition is what keeps most publishers automating, rather than innovating. Staid, European publishing houses like Oxford University Press, with histories that date back to the first printing presses, are not the only publishers influenced by a culture of tradition. Tradition equally affects our modern — by contrast — American society publishers, many of whom take pride in uninterrupted journal publishing throughout the Great Depression and World Wars. Every morning, the publishing executive walks down the long hallway, past the framed photographs and oil paintings of former publishers, beginning with the bearded gentleman with the pince-nez and ending with himself, a more youthful version staring back through the glass. No publishing executive wants to be known as the one who ended the lineage. Should it be surprising that so few are willing to gamble on one’s tradition? Silicon Valley is a different matter altogether. They lack the history and tradition of many institutions located on the East coast of the United States, let alone Europe. They are largely unencumbered by the chains of tradition ... Silicon Valley venture capital is behind PeerJ and Tim O’Reilly has a place on its governing board. Mr. O’Reilly has taken great interest in open access issues in recent years; nevertheless, venture capitalists like to get paid, not dividends, like shareholders of a public commercial publisher, but huge profits when they cash out. Think Facebook. Reuters seems to have forgotten this little detail when talking about publisher profits. The closest we’ve seen with the Silicon Valley spirit in the UK is Vitek Tracz, who does not appear to be burdened by the weight of success and tradition. Innovation that spurs a profitable company is sold off to staid automators and Tracz is free to start other ventures, such as F1000 Research, which includes many of the same attributes as PeerJ. Open access advocates should give daily thanks to this innovator, who showed the rest of the world that open access can make viable economic sense. In the end, PeerJ is not about technology. It is about a culture that is unencumbered by tradition, has money, and is willing to take risks. Most of all, it is populated by people who are willing to walk away from both their failures and their successes.”

Link:

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/06/14/peerj-silicon-valley-culture-enters-academic-publishing/

Updated:

08/16/2012, 06:08

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.gold oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.comment oa.advocacy oa.signatures oa.petitions oa.boycotts oa.elsevier oa.sustainability oa.funders oa.oreilly oa.peerj oa.f1000research oa.memberships oa.journals oa.economics_of

Authors:

abernard

Date tagged:

06/15/2012, 20:22

Date published:

06/15/2012, 20:54