What Do I Want from the Publisher of the Future?

Abstract

When I took on the role of Editor-in-Chief of this open-access journal, I began,for the first time, to think about scholarlycommunication beyond submitting my pa-pers and getting them published. Thisthinking led to previous Perspectives [1–3],all of which shared an underlying theme—there are many opportunities to achievebetter dissemination and comprehension ofour science, and as producers of that outputI believe authors have a responsibility to seeit used in the best possible way.No need to take my word regarding theopportunities that exist to improve schol-arly communication and comprehension. Irecommend reading ‘‘Part 4: ScholarlyCommunication’’ from the free onlinebook the Fourth Paradigm: Data Intensive Scien-tific Discovery [4] (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/fourthparadigm/),which is a tribute to the late Turing Awardwinner Jim Gray. Jim, and many of theauthors who pay homage to his vision, havethought deeply about the subject of scholarlycommunication. They conclude that dataand knowledge-driven computation is indeeda fourth wave, as computation has impactedscience to the point where every aspect of itis touched by computation (hence the nameeScience), including dissemination and com-prehension. These visionaries recognize thatwe are at a tipping point at which scholarlycommunication will change from a tradi-tional print-oriented medium (albeit an on-line version of the print journal) to somethingelse. That something else begins to transformtoday’s research article as we realize thepower of the medium, establish new forms ofknowledge discovery, and measure theimpact of scholarly contributions in newways. For all that vision, these luminaries donot address the question that I have beenpondering, and which I would like to raisehere. Assuming all this innovation takesplace, what will the publisher of the futurelook like, and as a contributor and consumerof a publisher’s services in this new era, whatdo I want from the publisher of the future?Recently, at gatherings of publisherswhere I have been invited to speak, I havebeen trying to pose and then answer thisquestion. Unfortunately, I fear that what Ipropose appears so radical as to be greetedwitheitherblankstaresorlooksof getreal.LetmetryheretodoabetterjobatstatingwhatI want from my publisher in the future.Many of you are undoubtedly thinkingthat just accepting your papers will beenough, but bear with me. Presumably,publishing will continue in the life sciences(unless we go over completely to anArXiv.org or similar model where articlesare simply deposited without peer reviewand impact measured by how much theyare accessed), and if so, will continue to beoverseen by the publishers we, as scientists,work with today. A few new and innova-tive publishers like the Public Library ofScience (PLoS) will continue to emerge asbusiness models and practices change, butexisting publishers will probably adapt inthis new era. I anticipate similarities toearlier phases of the Internet revolution.Amazon.com emerged as a new and majoronline-only shopping entity, but Sears,Wal-Mart, Harrods, etc., while beingslower in adopting the new medium, dideventually successfully support onlineshopping and a range of new services. Bycomparison, a few innovators have hadsome impact on scholarly communication,but traditional science, technology, andmedical (STM) publishers will continue todominate the conservative and relativelyslow-moving market. These pioneeringpublishers are now experimenting withinteractive PDFs, ‘‘articles of the future,’’semantic tagging, data integration withresearch articles, incorporating rich media(video and podcasts), and so on. Mostlikely, at some point these innovations willbecome mainstream through increasedintroduction by traditional publishers, butthen what? Stated another way, if wefinally move away from the traditionalPDF to something more dynamic thatintegrates data, rich media, and includesinteractive access, what do I as a scientistwant from publishers at that point?To answer this question, let us start withwhere we are today. As authors, we put anenormous amount of effort into producingapublishablemanuscript.Atsomepointwepass it over to the publisher without asecondthought.Subsequently,wewillputalarge amount of effort into a revision orrebuttal letter, but again, there is nothought on what will happen to our workafterithasbeenacceptedbeyondthedateitwill be published and appear in PubMed.There is an enormous amount of trust inour publisher that our creations will behandled in the best possible way and, whenpublished, that they will be disseminated toallwhowanttoreadourwork.Openaccessintroduced a hairline fracture in this trustwith some scientists realizing that perhapstheir work was notbeingaswidely accessedaspossible.Nevertheless,mostscientistsstilldo not think seriously about limited accessand signing away the copyright. After alloureffortsatproducingapaper,veryfewofus have asked the question, is journal xpresenting my work in a way that maxi-mizes the understanding of what has beendone, providing the means to ensuremaximum reproducibility of what has beendone, and maximizing the outreach of mywork? I would suggest that now is the timenottojusttossthepaperoverahighbarrierto the journal and forget about it, but tobreak down the barrier and have a newform of interaction and dialog with apublisher who is prepared to embrace achanging publishing model and cananswerthe question in a satisfactory manner. Inother words, we have an interaction withthe publisher that does not begin when thescientific process ends, but begins at thebeginning of the scientific process itself.Perhaps you are beginning to see why Iget so many blank stares when I raise thisissue with scientists (producers and consum-