Self Promotion as a Business Model:
March 17, 2016
I love it when universities reinvent stuff. Imagine an academic journal without fees. Instead of peer review, the journal features peer to peer review. You can get the scoop in “MIT Media Lab’s Journal of Design and Science Is a Radical New Kind of Publication.”
The idea is that the journal will combine design (phones that look like blocks of metal and science software which permits a self driving auto to collide with a bus). I learned:
Science, design, art, and engineering, long considered their own areas of focus, are no longer domains to be explored in isolation, but together, in the hopes of expediting progress and discovery.
Knock down those artificial walls between disciplines. Innovate with a new journal.
I am okay with this type of publication.
However, once the journal model is migrated from the warm, fuzzy, and endowed confines of the MIT womb, what’s the business model?
My hunch is that the “new” will have to work with the “old”; that is, subscribers have to pay and then renew, authors will grouse if some nag suggests that compensation is appropriate, vendors will want hard cash for bandwidth, and even sciencey Web programmers may want some money.
Interesting idea, but the business model remains the problem for new publications which have to survive in the present economic environment. Now if there is a friendly check writer who will provide a not for profit environment, there may be more publishing innovations like MIT’s. Until then, it looks like there will be blogs with comments allowed.
But the benefits to the innovator and his ability to publish information in an important “new” journal may be substantial. But that’s what universities are for today. Oh, universities also facilitate student loans. Great stuff higher education.
Stephen E Arnold, March 17, 2016
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