A recent blog post from The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics describes the dramatic increase in the number of open access journals and articles. The pace with which scientific content is changing from paid to free is increasing as well. Even for the usually conservative STEM publishing, the past year has proven that the trend towards free content is inescapable and is a direct consequence of the digitization of that content. In fact, this was clear to some more enlightened journalists many years ago. Esther Dyson (in 1995) predicted that content will be free:

“Chief among the new rules is that “content is free.” While not all content will be free, the new economic dynamic will operate as if it were. In the world of the Net, content (including software) will serve as advertising for services such as support, aggregation, filtering, assembly and integration of content modules, or training of customers in their use. Intellectual property that can be copied easily likely will be copied. It will be copied so easily and efficiently that much of it will be distributed free in order to attract attention or create desire for follow-up services that can be charged for. Advertising has a poor reputation in many quarters because most advertising is designed for a broad market. But in the one-to-one world the Net promises, advertising will often be tailored and of higher quality. Those with more money to spend will get higher-quality advertising."

-Esther Dyson 1995 (for the full article in Wired click here)

The scientific community and the publishers will be wise to heed this piece of early foresight and wisdom. Amazingly, Esther was able to predict this fundamental shift in 1995 which was definitively a pre-google era. Later in the article Esther talks about content being used to set up relationships and to sell ancillary services. In effect, this is what is happening in science already. Scientists who publish in higher profile journals get consulting contracts, opportunities to set up companies and more grants to fund their research.

The matter of scientific content being free to read and publish is not under question. Clearly, many companies are already paying for scientific content to be free and academia is moving in that direction. There are two questions that remain. I recently talked with a friend who suggested that people are getting annoyed at paying the high fees to PLOS and BMC to publish their research. So the first question is how quickly will the pay-for-publishing model be broken. The second question is what will replace it.

We think that the future is here now. So we’ve taken the first step and allowed anyone who has already created content which is behind publisher firewalls to claim it as their own. The scientists who choose to claim their publications can upload the manuscripts, share supp information and take advantage of the reason why the content was created in the first place: interacting with readers. Check out a previous post on the subject here and an example of a the theory in practice here.

Happy orwiking