Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Academic, which has announced a new 'Science Ethics and Innovation'
series edited by Sir John Huston. The series will be available free for
non-commercial use over the internet under a Creative Commons
Licence, with the publisher estimating that the cost of publication can
be recouped thorough sales of hard copies that will be printed via print-
on-demand and short-run printing technologies. The publisher Frances
Pinter estimates that Bloomsbury will have to sell around 200 copies of
a highly technical monograph, priced at around £50, to make a profit,
and believes it will take two years to judge whether the model is
financially viable. Pinter has pointed out that if publishers do not
experiment with such models, academics will bypass publishers (Page,
2009).
It would seem that whatever the area of publishing examined,
journals, reference materials, books or newspapers, the internet is
disrupting long-established business models and means of distribution.
Take, for example, another relatively new start-up enterprise -
Mendeley. Founded by three German academics and now based in
London, Mendeley allows authors to 'drag and drop' research papers
into its site, which automatically extracts keywords, cited references,
etc., and creates a searchable database. Mendeley say that instead of
authors waiting to be published and for citations to appear, they could
move to a regime of 'real time' citations, thereby greatly reducing the
time taken for research to be applied in the real world. The site already
contains over 4 million scientific papers and 60,000 people have already
signed up (Mendeley Research Networks, undated).
Some publishers' response will be to invest in preserving the status
quo rather than in adapting to the changing world. For others there are
undoubted opportunities to monetize new web technologies and
formats such as the e-book. However, as discussed earlier in this
chapter, the biggest threat to traditional publishing comes in the form
of Google. Not only is it digitizing books in their millions, it is also
challenging the publishing industry in other areas. Google Scholar,
which searches peer-reviewed abstracts and articles from academic
publishers, is challenging the established publishers of abstracting and
indexing databases. Those established databases are sold on
subscription to libraries, and users need to authenticate in order to use
them. How much easier it is to use the freely and easily available
Google Scholar - often good enough and in time. Google Maps not
