Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted?
By Paul Biba
In a long and extremely thoughtful post Michael Nielson analyzes the current state of scientific publishing. In the course of his analysis he has a lot to say about publishing in general. I highly recommend that you read the entire post. It is absolutely first rate. Thanks to Open for the link.
… I’ve described why it’s hard for incumbent organizations in a disrupted industry to change to a new model. The situation is even worse than I’ve described so far, though, because some of the forces preventing change are strongest in the best run organizations. The reason is that those organizations are large, complex structures, and to survive and prosper they must contain a sort of organizational immune system dedicated to preserving that structure. If they didn’t have such an immune system, they’d fall apart in the ordinary course of events. Most of the time the immune system is a good thing, a way of preserving what’s good about an organization, and at the same time allowing healthy gradual change. But when an organization needs catastrophic gut-wrenching change to stay alive, the immune system becomes a liability.
To see how such an immune system expresses itself, imagine someone at the New York Times had tried to start a service like Google News, prior to Google News. Even before the product launched they would have been constantly attacked from within the organization for promoting competitors’ products. They would likely have been forced to water down and distort the service, probably to the point where it was nearly useless for potential customers. And even if they’d managed to win the internal fight and launched a product that wasn’t watered down, they would then have been attacked viciously by the New York Times’ competitors, who would suspect a ploy to steal business. Only someone outside the industry could have launched a service like Google News.
July 3rd, 2009 at 1:18 am
This article is quite possibly the best argument for natural selection I have ever seen. The environment changes. The dinosaurs die. News no longer at eleven. News whenever you want it.
I cannot help but be struck by the similarity of this to the demise of the large department stores at the hands of specialty stores. Department stores offered higher quality when no one was around to compete product for product. But their ultimate shortcoming was meanness of their products. The department stores sold things of average quality to most people. How could they compete with small stores that were tailored to people’s specific demands?
The newspapers are the same way. When you hear things like, “the NYTimes is a quality publication” it means that the average quality is good, not the specific quality for a given article. Even the NYTimes cannot afford to employ all the greatest minds of our age. In addition, there is no way the NYTimes is going to cover, in depth, the interests of subcultures (which had their own means of gathering and spreading news even before the Web made the Net popular). They are in depth enough for experts and not simple enough for casual readers. In effect, the NYTimes is right for no one.