The Parachute: Collaborate, don't frustrate

"We have seen a fair amount of activity on the web in the last few weeks with regard to protests, even boycotts, aimed at prominent publishers. Most of it seems to be about money. When money is tight, it leads to a fight....So the solution is introducing competition. ‘Gold’ Open Access publishing does just that, albeit perhaps in a fairly primitive way, so far. It’s typically a game of new entrants. But in order to be truly successful, the scientific community at large has to buy in to it. Literally ‘buy’ into it. Publishers can lead the horse to the Open Access water, but they can’t make it drink. I won’t hold my breath. And there is so much else in science publishing, besides money matters, that needs to be improved. Just one example: fragmentation. Fragmentation is a big, frustrating problem. Particularly for the efficient and effective ingestion of information. But it need not be so bad. Although science publishers are bound by antitrust rules, there are areas of a pre-competitive nature where they are allowed to collaborate. Think standards, think CrossRef. Those forms of collaboration, for the benefit of science, could be expanded. Other standards could be introduced, to do with data linking, for instance, with data representation, computer-readability, interoperability. Things like structured abstracts. Perhaps even ontologies and agreed vocabularies for scientific concepts, analogous to biological and chemical nomenclature. User licences could be standardized, pre-competitively. Et cetera....And it is not just in pre-competitive areas where fragmentation could be remedied...."