By: Bill Kasdorf

Bill Kasdorf — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:42:42 +0000

One more comment: remember when a few publishers started to make it possible for you to click on a citation and actually GO TO the cited paper? Zowie, was that cool!!! Took a lot of effort, but boy, was that a differentiator . . . then.

By: Bill Kasdorf

Bill Kasdorf — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 16:38:47 +0000

The example of high-end encroachment in scholarly publishing that comes immediately to my mind is semantic tagging. I’m not referring to the low-end community based tagging that is rapidly becoming so common (and has its own distinct value–this is not an either/or). I’m talking about the very expert, systematic, granular, and USEFUL semantics that publishers like–well, Kent, like your own New England Journal of Medicine–add to their content. True, there are only a few out there who are doing this; they tend to be leaders in other ways (again, like NEJM) or commercial services who do this for commercial advantage. And believe me, it’s a real differentiator. An example of the latter is ProQuest’s Illustrata, which adds semantics to image data, making the images MUCH more useful. Another example is the technology Bob Kelly from APS and John Gardner from ViewPlus Technologies demonstrated at the SSP Annual meeting this year–designed to make images in physics journals accessible to the visually impaired, but as a side effect making them much more useful to physicists in general, who can apply analytical techniques to collections of images that they previously could apply only to text or data. Cool stuff does happen at the high end!

Comments on: Sneaky Disruption, High & Low

By: Bill Kasdorf

By: Bill Kasdorf