Joachim Engelland

Zoe Corbyn lists in her Times Higher Education article challenges to contemporary academic comunication and publishing, Yet no surprises or new arguments in there.  It remains difficult to foresee if and how these things will (severely) affect commercial publishers:

• adequateness of the impact factor – or viability and acceptance of any replacement systems
• open access attitude and actual behaviour (among researchers, university managers, funding providers…)
• the further development of PLOS (as a future open access giant – just like Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, ebay… ? How will they react to their  first case of fraud in PLOS…?)

Some of the reader comments I found useful. e.g. the suggestion to publish reviewers’ comments. This could indeed help the reader evaluate the article. And from a publisher point of view: this would probably also help driving usage to the journal, which will again help with subscriptions…

The journal RNA Biology requests from authors to create a Wikipedia entry with a link to the article istself. the entry will be peer reviewd along with the original article befor pushed life to Wikipedia. Here is a sample.

publisher’s benefit: Google ranks Wikipedia entries on top of their search results – thus providing excellent publicity to the original article.

Wikipedia’s benefit; those contributinos are actually peer revied – thus providing the kind of authority that Wikipedia entries usually lack.

I anticipate that this will be copied by other publishers very soon: expecting their authors to help promote their work by writing on Wikipedia.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.