Federated Publishing Revisited – Adam Hyde

"For example, Open Access (OA) is interesting because it is a movement for making research materials available for free. Free as in no cost, and free through the application of liberal Creative Commons licenses. However, OA still follows many of the norms of the publishing world, in that there are (capital P) Publishers which curate and control the access, display, and ‘functionality’ (although article functionality is a rather impoverished idea in this sector) for content. If an OA Publisher classifies article A as belonging to category B due to their internal taxonomy then that is where article A will go. If a Publisher enables annotation for ‘their’ content then you have annotation. If a Publisher enables threaded comments for discussion around the article then you have one place where you can discuss the findings. But…while Science Fair might sound like this – a place to find content (just like a Publisher) – it is not this. Science Fair distributes the content into a Dat network and how that content is surfaced, tagged, commented on etc is entirely up to the type of interface you use to access that content. If you wanted to share user-specific tagging taxonomies, for example, you can build that into Science Fair or a Science Fair-like interface. No need to wait for the Publisher. The researchers, then, could have complete control on how content is curated, displayed, discussed etc since in some sense the users start to become the publishers.  That is a pretty big step sideways...."