RIP Michael S. Hart, co-founder of Project Gutenberg which was, for many of us, one of the projects that lured us to the Net. Back in the day I contributed to the project and it is amazing that Michael and others have kept it going strong for so long.
Incidentally, the oft-forgotten co-founder of the project, Greg Newby, is (or was?) a research faculty member at our (UAF’s) supercomputing center. He’s on the right in the Wikimedia commons photo above.
via Brian Lamb’s delicious bookmarks this morning, a tasty read: “Why Hasn’t Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted Already?”. The comment thread is as useful as the article.
I’ve pondered the same question myself and found myself nodding my head in agreement with most of the observations in the article. But the elephantine non-secret to the lack of change is pretty obvious: the existence of a clear path to examining and improving– even transforming– the foundation of a system like scientific publishing doesn’t provide any incentive for those involved to do so. There’s a reason disruptive change is rare and most often comes about by unavoidable (and often destructive) force from outside the organizations that end up changing. The cottage industry that has emerged to write about disruptive change and innovation is mostly concerned with how an organization can attempt to be counted among that tiny fraction that have managed to embrace– or at least survive– those processes.
In this regard, scientific publishing shares important characteristics with mainstream journalism and newspaper publishing, which have also long provided the functions of validation, designation, and filtration. Are scientific publishers learning anything from the spectacular implosion of news publishing? Because from my layman’s perspective, it feels like they are on the same track leading to the same train wreck, just moving a bit slower.
Equally interesting to me is why the same mechanisms and technologies haven’t disrupted the forms of writing themselves more and in more significant ways. In educational technology circles we talk a lot about taking advantage of new media and technology to teach differently and in distance education we try to use the affordances of those technologies to create learning experiences (or craft a kind of learning space for those experiences) built on something other than a transfer of the face-to-face classroom techniques to a new environment… why aren’t writers doing more with the medium? Is it just too soon? There are a few scattered examples here and there of writing that really embraces the medium– and the fact that the means of publishing can be a symbiotic part of the writing– in some other way than transferring a literary journal to a blog or accompanying text with animation– and, as always, no end to the numbers of those experimenting and playing with the text itself– but it strikes me as strange that with so many amazing changes and expansions in what is possible that most writing could well have been written on a typewriter and published on a copier with no real loss.
Or am I just missing the disruptive “writing” innovations?
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