Sci Tech Publishers: Doom Looms for the Tech Challenged
July 3, 2009
Quite interesting essay by Michael Nielsen: “Is Scientific Publishing about to Be Disrupted?” The answer is soon. I don’t agree. Sci tech publishing is in the midst of a crisis. If you want to know about Mr. Nielsen’s good news interpretation of the coming disruption, dive in.
Mr. Nielsen, in case you haven’t been keeping up with quantum computation, is a real life wizard. He is one of the pioneers of quantum computation. Together with Ike Chuang of MIT, he wrote the standard text on quantum computation. This is the most highly cited physics publication of the last 25 years, and one of the ten most highly cited physics books of all time (Source: Google Scholar, December 2007). He is the author of more than fifty scientific papers, including invited contributions to Nature and Scientific American. His research contributions include involvement in one of the first quantum teleportation experiments (related), named as one of Science Magazine’s Top Ten Breakthroughs of the Year for 1998, quantum gate teleportation, quantum process tomography, the fundamental majorization theorem for comparing entangled quantum states, and critical contributions to the formula for the quantum channel capacity.
He explains that publishers are victims of a local optimum; that is, publishers know where they should take their companies. Publishers just can’t bridge the gap. He provides a useful discussion of the knocks traditional media deliver to the digital door to online information.
But the guts of the write up are gathered in his discussion of non traditional publishing of scientific and technical information. The links are useful and the examples are compelling. Let me mention one; the others you can glean directly from his write up. He wrote:
Or consider startups like SciVee (YouTube for scientists), the Public Library of Science, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, vibrant community sites like OpenWetWare and the Alzheimer Research Forum, and dozens more. And then there are companies like WordPress, Friendfeed, and Wikimedia, that weren’t started with science in mind, but which are increasingly helping scientists communicate their research. This flourishing ecosystem is not too dissimilar from the sudden flourishing of online news services we saw over the period 2000 to 2005.
He concludes his essay with some examples of new opportunities. His recipe for success is that publishers must understand technology in the way Steve Jobs and Messrs Brin and Page do. That’s where he and I part company. A technologist like Mr. Nielsen assumes that a motivated manager can identify, recruit, and manage a world class technologist or somehow edge closer to this capability.
Won’t happen. Technologists like Mr. Nielsen come from a different dimension; sci tech publishers adopt a very different technology world. Nevertheless, the essay is interesting and worth reading.
Stephen Arnold, July 3, 2009
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