There is an important editorial in this week’s Journal of Neuroscience about the changes that are affecting how science gets disseminated. While I don’t necessarily agree with the authors, I do feel that change is in the air–ten years from now, I think scientific journals will look very different from the way they do today.
The key point that is missed by many of the folks who are advocates of open access is that there is a value-added component to a publication that arises out of the editorial process (all the way from peer review to archiving) that costs real money. If the money isn’t going to come from subscriptions (open access) then it must come from somewhere else. Most current notions of a solution come down to page charges of some sort.
The question is can those real costs be lowered using technology? Certainly at my own journal, we are finding that our new on-line editorial system is making the process much easier (and hence probably less expensive). But there are aspects of the editorial process which are don’t seem to have much technological cost elasticity (e.g. peer review). I don’t see how a robot reviewer is going to replace a human scientist any time soon.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 