Abstract
The web has changed our information-seeking behaviour radically, yet scholarly communication remains firmly embedded in the traditions of the print world. Here, I argue that the dropping costs of publication and distribution mean that effort and resource expended on preventing publication is wasted and that developing the tools and culture for post- publication annotation, curation and ranking is more productive. Rather than see this as information overload, or in Clay Shirky’s words, a ‘filter failure’, I propose that it is more useful to see the problem as a ‘discovery deficit’.This flood of content, instead of being a problem, is an opportunity to build technical and cultural frameworks that will enable us to extract more value from the outputs of research by exploiting the efficiencies that web-based systems can provide.
Highlights
My first real exposure to research was in 1993
This persisted through the beginning of my PhD in 1995, but as the world wide web gained a hold, journal articles started to appear in electronic format and tables of contents would arrive by e-mail
Medline, which had been nearly useless to me when it came on a compact disc, appeared online as PubMed, shifting the pattern of information discovery away from reading a paper index to running a search
Summary
My first real exposure to research was in 1993. I vividly remember sitting in a laboratory while my research supervisor explained the process of research. Investing time and effort in explicit decisions about whether to publish no longer adds value, because the cost of publication is effectively zero and the potential costs of not publishing become significant. If researchers as a community fail to take advantage of these efficiencies, if we continue to encourage publishers and librarians to act in the role of gatekeepers, if we don’t start taking responsibility for our own filters, we are failing in our duty to maximize the efficient use of public money invested in research.
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