[Web4lib] Authority + Wikipedia

[mike at indexdata.com]

> Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 12:05:49 -0500
> From: "Thomale, J" <j.thomale at ttu.edu>
> 
> The web and the online world do exacerbate this problem [of knowing
> which resources are authoritative] in that they make publication so
> incredibly easy. The web is an infinitely larger and more complex
> information organism than the press by itself. These problems and
> issues aren't new, they're just magnified *very much* in the current
> networked environment.

This is true, but I don't think it's a bad thing.  Historically,
publishers have fulfilled two function which are conceptually quite
separate: one function is simply that of dissemination.  The other is
quality filtering.  Until ten years ago, pretty much the only way for
anyone to get anything published was by going through a publisher, and
publishers would on the whole reject candidate publications that
couldn't meet quality requirements.

Fast forward ten years, and the problem of dissemination is a solved
one.  Anyone can easily publish their writings.  (The significance of
blogging is only that it finally fulfils the "easy publishing" promise
that was made by the early web, but which wasn't fufilled for a long
time because of the technical difficulties of dealing with HTML and
FTP.)

Some publishers are trying to hang on to their historical
dissemination role by creating artificial scarcity -- limiting access
to materials.  In my view, that strategy is doomed in the long and
medium term, and probably even in the short term -- certainly for
academic publishing.  Authors just care too much about getting their
stuff out there to be limited by seemingly arbitrary restrictions
imposed by publishers.

So that leaves only one role for publishers: quality filtering.  While
anyone can publish their ideas in a blog, it's much harder to get your
ideas into Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.  You need to get past a
rigorous quality filter: the editors' initial vetting, then
peer-review.  For this reason, a publication in APP is, quite rightly,
accorded more respect, considered to be more authoritative, than one
in a blog.

What's interesting in this case is that APP actually disseminates its
articles in exactly the same way as a blogger: by open access on the
web (http://app.pan.pl/) So the publisher in this instance is
contributing nothing at all to the process of dissemination -- it's
just putting articles on its web-site that could much more easily put
up on the author's own Geocities web-site.  What the publisher offers,
paradoxically, is precisely a set of _barriers_ to dissemination: the
value it adds is that the articles that do get disseminated, with the
APP mark on them, are stamped as being high quality(*).

So what we find in the Internet age is that the role of publishers has
turned through 180 degrees.  Whereas once their primary role was to
provide a way for writings to be disseminated, now their primary role
is to _prevent_ writings from being disseminated -- except for the few
that are judged worthy of dissemination.  In the next few years, we'll
see more and more authors move towards open-access journals (because
they want their work to be findable and obtainable), and the
publishers that have been relying on their dissemination role to
provide profits will fail.  Those that have already realised that
their main role is now in quality-filtering will be better positioned
to survive the transition into the new world.

Finally: I realise that all of this applies much more to academic
articles than to books.  For the former, a downloaded PDF is usually
95% as good as an original copy or reprint; for the latter, the book
itself is a desirable object: no-one wants to download _Harry Potter
and the Hypertrophied Caudal Pleurocoels_ and print it out, they'd
rather have the actual book.  So in that medium, publishers will
continue to have a role as the makers of nice physical objects.
Although print-on-demand may erode that role.

 _/|_	 ___________________________________________________________________
/o ) \/  Mike Taylor  <mike at miketaylor.org.uk>  http://www.miketaylor.org.uk
)_v__/\  "`start' must be between 1 and approximately 65535" -- Microsoft
	 Visual Basic documentation for the InStr() function.


(*) Alert readers may have guessed that I've had a submission rejected
by Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, and not yet got over it :-)