To survive, it is critical that journals look at what it means to serve as an information bridge between author and reader. How do we best serve this relationship in an era of information innovation? This may mean moving beyond a traditional definition of a “journal.”

As part of our major redesign this month at Health Affairs, we thought hard about our reason for being. In doing so, we changed our long-standing tagline from “The Journal of the Health Policy Sphere” to “At the Intersection of Health, Health Care, and Policy.” This intersection – bringing together readers and authors, thought and practice, is our mission – in whatever form it takes.

Jane

I’ve fallen into the trap of equating irrelevancy to disruption before, and probably will again. But I think this post helped me realign my thinking about exactly what disruption is and isn’t, at least according to Christensen’s theory. And again, maybe we’ve avoided disruption, but can we avoid irrelevancy?

I’ll extract the pertinent bit;

“The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to
make an easy but powerful global information system.

The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should
be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within
internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by
support groups.”

Note the use of the f-word.

We have done a good job of bringing our stuff online, but I guess my concern is this (and what I took out of your careers posting Michael) We were successful to start with as the web was conceived as an electronic metaphor for the page. The problem with digital objects, which is what we deal with now, is that that metaphor falls apart. How well are we equiped to deal with it? A fundemental property of a digital object seems to be its tendency to be duplicated at will, whether we like it or not. There are many other properties, and I’m not sure we understand them well enough to be fit enough (in the evolutionary sense) to survive what coming. Kent,I recall this post: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/10/02/game-over-man-has-the-disruption-of-publishing-already-occurred/

Have you changed your mind?

Did we suddenly become an industry of agile thinkers?

Really?

If Jan 27th brings what I think it is going to, the environment we live in could be very different by the morning of Jan 28th.

Another interesting possibility is that the Web itself has inoculated the industry. I mean this in two senses:

1. As the Web was built with scientific communication in mind, scientists and scientific publishers were some of the very first make use of it. Up until the Mosaic release in 1993 and the explosion of consumer sites, it was “our” Web. Whereas other industries were blindsided by the Web, we knew it would impact scientific publishing from day 1.

2. Because the Web was built with scientific communications in mind, it resembles scientific publication at a deep level. Hypertext links resemble citations (and indeed, Google’s billion dollar insight was that hypertext linking can be used to calculate a Page Rank just as citations can be used to calculate an impact factor—what is Page Rank if not a more sophisticated impact factor for the Web?). Web pages resemble articles (and are even called “pages”). We imbed images on pages just as typesetters have long embedded figures in articles. The Web’s operating metaphor is, at a fundamental level, a scientific article.

Because of this, it has been relatively easy for scientific publishers to retrofit their products for the Web (it was, after all, made to do that). And because we saw it coming early on, we did it before anyone else had a chance to.

And it might just happen that way again. David Smith mentions Open Data as a potential Black Swan. It could be. But the semantic Web is once again being built with scientific communication in mind. Anyone who has not seen Tim Berners-Lee’s talk at TED 2009, I strongly advise you to make time to do just that. It will be worth your time.

In keeping with Kent’s theme of an industry taking on its own disruptor, the VCR might be a good example, going from being seen as the “Boston Strangler” to reaching a point where video sale revenues were higher than box office receipts (though this year saw an interesting reversal).

Ultimately, I don’t disagree with your arguments, but I wanted to see if there was potentially another explanation. In my mind, we’ve been expanding the definition of “journal” so dramatically that it’s become as abstract as you portray it, and then some. Journals are faster, primarily digital, full of new voices, multimedia-rich, data-ready, and so forth. Where is there room left for disruption? Which publisher couldn’t easily absorb (intellectually, economically, practically) any looming disruption because the scientific publishing industry has positioned itself in this way?

I guess from when I first read Christensen’s book and when I gave my first major talk about disruption nearly 10 years ago, I’ve always wondered if the mere presence of his ideas might allow people to inoculate themselves to the dangers. I’m still thinking the scientific publishing industry might have vaccinated itself against most of the current strains of disruption.

That’s no guarantee that there isn’t the disruptive equivalent of H1N1 out there, or that we won’t get hit by a truck.

To borrow David Smith’s example, if Mendeley were to successfully create repositories in which peer-reviewed scientific articles—articles which never appeared in journals—and journals ceased to exist as a result, would that not be a classic market disruption? The articles, like the song or steel, would still be produced and published, but the mode of publication and distribution would shift.

I agree with you that the scholarly publishing industry is a collegial place, open to experimentation, and that culture has certainly helped the industry adapt to the technological changes of the last two decades. But I don’t think that would be enough to forestall a market disruption if dissemination and registration (and even filtration) were the only functions of journals. My post was conceived as a response to Michael Nielsen’s argument that new market entrants will likely disrupt (or supplant) the journal as they are more technologically sophisticated than scientific publishers.

My argument is that the main reason that the industry has not faced a serious disruption event — by which I mean a new publication model that supplants the journal (just as iTunes supplanted the CD) as the primary mode of publishing articles — is that the filtration, validation, and especially dissemination functions of journals are deeply woven into the fabric of the scientific community.