It's going to be fascinating to see if this model for scientific publishing works. It's going to have some fearsome obstacles to overcome, though. First, authors won't want to pay to be published -- scientific publishing already works unlike almost all other commercial publishing in that authors get paid nothing at all directly. The benefit to the author is purely in prestige and the ability to cite said prestige when tenure time comes up, or when time comes to negotiate higher pay from your institution, or something like that. Second, the plan to charge research sponsors may run into difficulty in that first, most of them have already paid to have the research done in the first place, and second, they'll want the results published in the highest prestige journal that the authors can get into. PLOS journals stand a significant risk of becoming the publication place of last resort. This is not to say that they'll be publishing bad science, only that people will be trying more established journals first.
PLOS is based, in part on the Open Content License. The idea is that people can then take the content and freely adapt it for their purposes -- always giving credit to the original writer, of course. Scientific literature would seem to be peculiarly ill-suited to that sort of license, although that's the way much scientific research works.
The New York Times (registration required) has an article entitled, "Steal this Book", in which they discuss Prentice-Hall's use of the license to publish computer science books. Apparently, they feel that the risk is relatively minimal: "If you want to take one these books, put it on a photocopy machine and make copies, that's cool," said [Bruce Perens], a leading open-source advocate. [...] There is nothing to prevent programmers from waiting a couple of months to download copies of the books free rather than buying them. But Mr. Perens, a member of the digital avant-garde, predicts that serious programmers will buy the books for $50 each. Why? "People like paper," he said.
And, yes, they do like paper. They also have relatively inexpensive printers, and people at many institutions even have access to printers that produce doublesided output. (Although the joy of binding done by Somebody Else cannot be underestimated.) The risks may be slightly greater than Prentice-Hall thinks it will be.
Elsewhere, the people at Paid must just be wondering what the hell those open source nuts are up to, thinking that content wants to be free, or should be free. This week, they're appalled that Google is free. Frankly, I can't imagine how you could make search engines a paid resource. Not usefully, anyway. It would only work if all of the search engines moved to a paid model all at once, or if there was some ultra-premium service that they could offer for a fee. Northern Light has been floundering about trying to come up with some sort of functioning fee model for years, but doesn't seem to have been outrageously successful at it. (And apparently morphed into a business-sources only search engine while I wasn't looking. Pity. It was a rather nice search engine, if not comprehensive enough these days.) Paid also seems to make the assumption that users are willing to pay for what Google has to offer ... but if Google itself can't figure out how to position premium services, then it doesn't seem likely, now does it? And since Google actually does license its technology via strategic partnerships (although Inktomi was better at that), I'm not entirely sure what Paid is grousing about.
Posted by iain at January 17, 2003 12:28 AMComments
