Academic journals in a networked world
Academic journals perform roughly the same function as record labels — they filter and distribute. Both help their customers navigate the large amount of content available. And both face potential obsolescence for similar reasons: the net makes distribution an almost zero-cost venture and facilitates filtering by the users themselves.
So, what’s a journal to do? I think journals need to embrace the net (is fighting it even an option?) and transform from simple providers of knowledge to platforms for knowledge. Nature seems to be taking steps in the right direction: Connotea, an online, social reference manager, has been available for a while now and recently, they released Nature Precedings as an arXiv-like preprint service for the biochem world.
The filtering that journals provide (in the form of peer-review) isn’t going away anytime soon but it’s nice to see some journals expand beyond their traditional role in science.
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