7371075-Wikinomics by unknow

Author:unknow
Format: mobi

publishing. Frustrated authors can find their cutting-edge discoveries less

cutting edge after a lumbering review process has delayed final publication by

up to a year, and in some cases longer. With the pace of science increasing

today, that's just not fast enough.

The other problem is that the vast majority of published research today is only

available to paid subscribers. Ever increasing subscription fees, meanwhile, have

made this research less accessible. What's worse is that these impediments to

access persist despite the availability of much cheaper electronic publishing

methods. Though an unlimited number of additional readers could access digital

copies of research at virtually no additional cost, publishers hold back for fear of

creating a Napster-like phenomenon.

No doubt these problems are hangovers from a world of physical distribution

and a much more limited volume of publishing. The current publishing regime

emerged in seventeenth-century Europe, when the pace of discovery was glacial

by twenty-first-century standards. Scientific journals provided the primary

infrastructure for scholarly communication and collaboration. Apart from annual

academic symposiums, journals were the place where scientists could find out

about, engage with, and carefully critique each other's work. Publishing journals

was expensive, entailing significant capital and operational costs.

As the scientific endeavor swells in scale and speed, however, a growing

number of participants in the scientific ecosystem are questioning whether the

antiquated journal system is adequate to satisfy their needs. New communication

technologies render paper-based publishing obsolete. The traditional

peer-reviewed journal system is already being augmented, if not superseded, by

increasing amounts of peer-to-peer collaboration.

Science Goes Large Scale

Organizing the pursuit of knowledge in a peer-to-peer fashion is certainly

nothing new in science. But recent research suggests that collaboration is

exploding. One study conducted by the Santa Fe Institute found that the average

high-energy physicist now has around 173 collaborators. The same study found

that the average number of authors per scientific paper has doubled and tripled in

a number of fields. A growing number of papers

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