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Web 2.0 and scholarly publishing
By Daviess Menefee, Library Relations Director, Elsevier, Columbus, OH, USA

(The following is an excerpt from a presentation I gave while on the Library Connect Australian road trip this past August. I owe a debt of gratitude to Martin Tanke, Elsevier’s managing director of publishing, who first created it.)

Since the time of Henry Oldenburg in 1665 and the appearance of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the scholarly journal has fulfilled a primary role for researchers in communicating the results and discoveries from their experiments. This role can be defined by four distinct qualities:

1. Registration (or the time stamping of a discovery or idea)
2. Validation (the review by one’s peers affirming the discovery)
3. Distribution (pushing the article content to new users and markets)
4. Archive (insuring the journal content will be available in the future)

The “journal” itself has performed well over time and has even evolved (e.g., Letters, News, Reviews) following various changes in scientific communication. Now, we see new technologies on the horizon, specifically Web 2.0, that challenge the traditional role of the journal. I will discuss some of these here.

Where journal and online functions converge

Today, researchers can choose to make their findings available over the Web in a variety of ways. By uploading documents to Google Base or Flickr, users can establish the time when the material was first placed in the public domain. Even pictures can be mounted and shared within a trusted network. In short, these and other sites (e.g., YouTube) can assume the journal’s role of registration in the publishing process.

Furthermore, the rating and networking services in the Web 2.0 world are fairly ubiquitous. Networking platforms have grown dramatically as major players (Google, Yahoo) have invested and promoted these companies. LinkedIn, MySpace and ZoomInfo, to name only a few, have helped to create communities of like-minded people. This too sounds very much like the role of the scholarly journal.

Rating services, moreover, have become popular (Amazon, Digg) as readers vote on and review their favorite books or news stories. Who can resist taking a survey in order to see the results? It is then but a small step to envision how social networking together with rating sites could become a type of validation process, a critical process of the research journal. Will this happen? It is hard to say at this point in time but the means are already in place to effect it.

The Internet has, as we know by now, facilitated the distribution and access to scholarly journal articles around the globe. A researcher at just about any place in the world has access to the most current scientific information. But online technology does not stop at the physical distribution; there are Web 2.0 add-on and value-add services that promote and facilitate the distribution of articles. One of these is 2collab, Elsevier’s new tool that allows researchers to share bookmarks among a select group or the general public. This tool and others like it (e.g., del_icio_us) act as filtering mechanisms for information. This saves researchers precious time and brings them into contact with others who have similar interests.

Will younger scholars decide to move away from traditional journal communication and place their research directly on the Web?

We come now to “archiving,” an area familiar to all of us. Libraries have maintained this responsibility for time immemorial. In the Electronic Age, however, we are witnessing new players entering this arena where there may be money to be made. Google Book Search is probably the best example of old content finding new value as thousands of books are scanned every day. It is safe to say, I think, that Google has a business model (advertising) tied to its investment in post-copyright content and expects a decent return for its shareholders.

Additionally, several other groups — including the Open Content Alliance and Wayback Machine — have also made old content their focus. While the goals of these groups may be slightly different, each strives to archive digitized text and multimedia content. Web references, too, have found an archiving interest in WebCite, a platform that stores Web pages and websites in addition to citations. Archiving has moved beyond the library.

The way ahead

To sum up, there are now Web 2.0 sites and companies in all four areas that are the domain of the scholarly journal. Further, the direction towards social networking and communication is certainly the path of the next generation and those who follow. Taking these two trends together, we can see the scholarly journal as we know it could be in jeopardy.

The question we as publishers face is: Will younger scholars decide to move away from traditional journal communication and place their research directly on the Web? Other factors (besides generational and technology trends) play a part in the answer, such as tenure and promotion and of course the prestige of publishing in high-quality journals. Only time can answer the question posed here, but it remains, nevertheless, the responsibility of publishers to develop Web 2.0 tools to meet the needs of current and future scholars.