This may be a little late, but I took up Dave Aiello and Dave Winer on their challenge for an RSS search engine and put one together. You can get to it at:
I think publishers are going to exist and have to exist, someone has to manage this process that is called publishing. Whether it is the current batch of established publishers or a new breed that do has now been focused on with the advent of the internet, but I feel that change will come slowly but surely.
I wanted to emphasize on and add a number of things to this discussion. I have some experience with the publishing process having worked in an academic environment where we worked on changing this process, as well as having developed an electronic journal browser for a major publisher, and looked at setting up my own company to do electronic publishing.
Publishers have been around for a very long time, for example one of the oldest is Elsevier Science, they were around when Galileo Galilei published his books and, indeed, published one for him outside Italy when the Pope made it clear that no Italian publishers were to handle his material. We can safely conclude that they are most likely doing something right, and by right I mean that they, for better or for worse, fill a need in a market.
The core of what publishers bring to the market is a structure in the form of an editorial process to filter and organize materials that are subsequently distributed out to whomever wants to buy them. The work associated with that is huge because of the number of papers received, the coordination tasks that go with distributing these papers, reviewing them, getting the reviews back to the authors to make corrections, getting the corrections back, organizing all this into an issue, getting it printed and sent out. Add in the fact that most, if not all, editors do this for free, and all reviewer do this for free, making motivation a difficult thing to impart. The advent of email and electronic has presumably made this process a little, but the organizational and coordination issues exist whether you use email or snail mail, and the delays are not in the transmission of information. All this is expensive as is detailed in the post from APSmith here.
What publishers also bring to the table is a brand in the shape of a journal, this is very important as people will want to publish in recognized journals and will want to read recognized journals. They do this because they trust the quality of the articles in those journals. This is not unlike people filtering articles based on ratings here on Slashdot. This touches on another task performed by the journals which is aggregation. They collect and organize articles making it easy for me to read about particular subjects in one place.
You may think by now that I am on the side of publishers, not true, I have only illustrated one side of the picture here. Publishers know their position in the market and have been very good at exploiting it. They have been very skillful at cost shifting, putting the cost of journals on libraries rather than on authors (page charges notwithstanding) and on consumers. So the people who generate and consume the information pay very little directly. This is very skillful. Because of their monopoly position in the market, this allows them to increase journal prices considerably without losing too much revenue.
So I hear cries from people all around, why not transfer the process back to the authors/consumers and publish on the web and the publishers be damned. This is a great idea, except for the fact that it does not seem to have happened so far. There have been a number of very good papers from a large number of (very smart) people as to why this should happen with all the usual arguments (I wont rehash them here), along with a number of service providers getting into the business and free software released, but, save for a few small success, this mass migration has not happened.
There have been a number of very interesting developments in some niche areas, the most famous one being the arXiv maintained at Los Alamos. There have been others successes modeled on that effort in small communities and small associations. I believe they have been successful for a number of reasons. First the community in question is small and the number of papers produced in small, making it very easy for the members to assess the quality of articles themselves, this is simply not possible in larger communities. Second the materials published have a very short shelf-life making it imperative to cut out the traditional publishing cycle which can take up to a year or more. Fast moving sciences (like physics) lends itself particularly well to that.
But as I said above, a mass migration has not happened.
My personal feeling is that there is a co-dependent relationship between publishers and the tenure system. publishers seek to build up their brands (journals) by publishing the best articles which they will attract, and academics seek to publishing in good journals because it improves their chances of getting tenure. Who would want to publish in a second or third tier journal when you can publish in a first tier journal. Until that relationship is broken, there simply is not going to be a mass migration. Where the system is fragile (in a relative sense of course) is the brand (journal). They key is to maintain the value, in all senses, of a brand (journal), and the publishers will protect that to the end. Witness the controversy when the NIH started to talk about putting together a repository for published materials called PubMed Central. The publishers were worried because the NIH brought along a brand, a sense of quality, dependability and permanence, something which could challenge the publishers.
I realized this when I was working to put together a start-up to provide an entirely electronic publishing process as a service, there is so much more you can do in an electronic environment than in a print environment (duh!), but it was clear that it would take a long time (hence money) and a lot of work to built up a brand that would self-sustain. Even then there are costs that have to be met, if you remove the publisher and the library from the process, leaving the producer (author) and the consumer (reader), you have effectively taken out the party who bears the brunt of the costs (the library). You cant ask for the producers to pay (a lot) for publishing and it is difficult to ask the consumer to pay for the information when they have been used to getting it for free (a perceived notion, but a very real notion nonetheless).
So my advice for anyone who wants to enter this market is as follows: have plenty of cash because it will take you a long time (read years) before an brand is established; start small, associations are a good place to start because they frequently do things manually and they talk to each other, referrals are important; understand who your customers are, they are not the producers or the consumers, they are the associations or sponsors; understand the market well, there are many publishing models out there, publishers, pre-print servers, personal web sites, associations, special interest groups, etc...; and last be prepared for the fact that the economics of publishing on the web are not all that different from publishing in print, just look where your costs are.
Finally, if you have made it to the end of this piece, I would be interested in talking to anyone who wants to get into this market, I have some expertise in the matter and am looking for something challenging to do.
- I have a legal copy of Toast. - I have used Toast since version 4 came out and have been very happy with it.
I am a computer consultant and regularly have to deal with reading contracts, usually written in legalese. While I am not a lawyer, my take of these things is that they are usually worse than they appear. So my take on that clause is that it gives Roxio the right to download updates to you computers at will, even when you are not looking (remember, it is allowed if it is not prohibited).
I dont know many people who would be happy with that. Suppose they decide to download some piece of DRM code which crashes my computer, requiring me to spend a day rebuilding everything. Not good for my business and I cant sue Roxio for that even though they are responsible.
This is not acceptable, it is like letting a car company come into your garage at night to mess with your car without your consent? I know I wouldnt let any car company do that, so why would I let a computer company?
This type of restriction is unacceptable, I have gone back to the previous version of Toast and have let Roxio know about this.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.rss-search.com/
Thanks for the correction about Elsevier.
I think publishers are going to exist and have to exist, someone has to manage this process that is called publishing. Whether it is the current batch of established publishers or a new breed that do has now been focused on with the advent of the internet, but I feel that change will come slowly but surely.
I wanted to emphasize on and add a number of things to this discussion. I have some experience with the publishing process having worked in an academic environment where we worked on changing this process, as well as having developed an electronic journal browser for a major publisher, and looked at setting up my own company to do electronic publishing.
Publishers have been around for a very long time, for example one of the oldest is Elsevier Science, they were around when Galileo Galilei published his books and, indeed, published one for him outside Italy when the Pope made it clear that no Italian publishers were to handle his material. We can safely conclude that they are most likely doing something right, and by right I mean that they, for better or for worse, fill a need in a market.
The core of what publishers bring to the market is a structure in the form of an editorial process to filter and organize materials that are subsequently distributed out to whomever wants to buy them. The work associated with that is huge because of the number of papers received, the coordination tasks that go with distributing these papers, reviewing them, getting the reviews back to the authors to make corrections, getting the corrections back, organizing all this into an issue, getting it printed and sent out. Add in the fact that most, if not all, editors do this for free, and all reviewer do this for free, making motivation a difficult thing to impart. The advent of email and electronic has presumably made this process a little, but the organizational and coordination issues exist whether you use email or snail mail, and the delays are not in the transmission of information. All this is expensive as is detailed in the post from APSmith here.
What publishers also bring to the table is a brand in the shape of a journal, this is very important as people will want to publish in recognized journals and will want to read recognized journals. They do this because they trust the quality of the articles in those journals. This is not unlike people filtering articles based on ratings here on Slashdot. This touches on another task performed by the journals which is aggregation. They collect and organize articles making it easy for me to read about particular subjects in one place.
You may think by now that I am on the side of publishers, not true, I have only illustrated one side of the picture here. Publishers know their position in the market and have been very good at exploiting it. They have been very skillful at cost shifting, putting the cost of journals on libraries rather than on authors (page charges notwithstanding) and on consumers. So the people who generate and consume the information pay very little directly. This is very skillful. Because of their monopoly position in the market, this allows them to increase journal prices considerably without losing too much revenue.
So I hear cries from people all around, why not transfer the process back to the authors/consumers and publish on the web and the publishers be damned. This is a great idea, except for the fact that it does not seem to have happened so far. There have been a number of very good papers from a large number of (very smart) people as to why this should happen with all the usual arguments (I wont rehash them here), along with a number of service providers getting into the business and free software released, but, save for a few small success, this mass migration has not happened.
There have been a number of very interesting developments in some niche areas, the most famous one being the arXiv maintained at Los Alamos. There have been others successes modeled on that effort in small communities and small associations. I believe they have been successful for a number of reasons. First the community in question is small and the number of papers produced in small, making it very easy for the members to assess the quality of articles themselves, this is simply not possible in larger communities. Second the materials published have a very short shelf-life making it imperative to cut out the traditional publishing cycle which can take up to a year or more. Fast moving sciences (like physics) lends itself particularly well to that.
But as I said above, a mass migration has not happened.
My personal feeling is that there is a co-dependent relationship between publishers and the tenure system. publishers seek to build up their brands (journals) by publishing the best articles which they will attract, and academics seek to publishing in good journals because it improves their chances of getting tenure. Who would want to publish in a second or third tier journal when you can publish in a first tier journal. Until that relationship is broken, there simply is not going to be a mass migration. Where the system is fragile (in a relative sense of course) is the brand (journal). They key is to maintain the value, in all senses, of a brand (journal), and the publishers will protect that to the end. Witness the controversy when the NIH started to talk about putting together a repository for published materials called PubMed Central. The publishers were worried because the NIH brought along a brand, a sense of quality, dependability and permanence, something which could challenge the publishers.
I realized this when I was working to put together a start-up to provide an entirely electronic publishing process as a service, there is so much more you can do in an electronic environment than in a print environment (duh!), but it was clear that it would take a long time (hence money) and a lot of work to built up a brand that would self-sustain. Even then there are costs that have to be met, if you remove the publisher and the library from the process, leaving the producer (author) and the consumer (reader), you have effectively taken out the party who bears the brunt of the costs (the library). You cant ask for the producers to pay (a lot) for publishing and it is difficult to ask the consumer to pay for the information when they have been used to getting it for free (a perceived notion, but a very real notion nonetheless).
So my advice for anyone who wants to enter this market is as follows: have plenty of cash because it will take you a long time (read years) before an brand is established; start small, associations are a good place to start because they frequently do things manually and they talk to each other, referrals are important; understand who your customers are, they are not the producers or the consumers, they are the associations or sponsors; understand the market well, there are many publishing models out there, publishers, pre-print servers, personal web sites, associations, special interest groups, etc...; and last be prepared for the fact that the economics of publishing on the web are not all that different from publishing in print, just look where your costs are.
Finally, if you have made it to the end of this piece, I would be interested in talking to anyone who wants to get into this market, I have some expertise in the matter and am looking for something challenging to do.
- I have a legal copy of Toast.
- I have used Toast since version 4 came out and have been very happy with it.
I am a computer consultant and regularly have to deal with reading contracts, usually written in legalese. While I am not a lawyer, my take of these things is that they are usually worse than they appear. So my take on that clause is that it gives Roxio the right to download updates to you computers at will, even when you are not looking (remember, it is allowed if it is not prohibited).
I dont know many people who would be happy with that. Suppose they decide to download some piece of DRM code which crashes my computer, requiring me to spend a day rebuilding everything. Not good for my business and I cant sue Roxio for that even though they are responsible.
This is not acceptable, it is like letting a car company come into your garage at night to mess with your car without your consent? I know I wouldnt let any car company do that, so why would I let a computer company?
This type of restriction is unacceptable, I have gone back to the previous version of Toast and have let Roxio know about this.
Cheers