Is PDF the MP3 of research?. A deep dive into how the digital… | by Nikolaos Nanas | Oct, 2024 | Medium

"When Christos Spiliopoulos, Christopher Varakliotis, and I moved to Atypon and anchored its Thessaloniki office in January 2017, the digitization of research was well underway. The number of Open Access journals was rapidly increasing, posing a challenge to the traditional license-based revenue models of academic publishers like Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley. It quickly became clear to me that music and research were following parallel paths, albeit with research lagging a decade or so behind. Just as MP3s brought music to the masses, PDFs have done the same for research.

As I’ve transitioned from music and news to research publishing, I’ve noticed striking analogies between the journey from vinyl to Spotify and the shift from print journals to Open Access, preprint archives, and beyond. These analogies between two seemingly unrelated paradigms offer valuable lessons, and I’d like to share them with you...."