Dennis D. McDonald (ddmcd@ddmcd.com)consults from Alexandria Virginia. His services include writing & research, proposal development, and project management.
To appreciate some of the implications of the recent proposal by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) to make consideration of journal article acceptance contingent upon the author’s agreement to share de-identified clinical trial data with other researchers, as reported by NPR, some context is appropriate.
I think this is another case where to change behavior you need to change motivation and the only way to that in such a complex environment is through education and through support of viable alternatives.
Having devoted part of my career to electronic publishing systems for scientific and technical publishing I’ve tried to follow the “Open Access” movement, but I have never quite understood what “Open Access” means.
In “Stop deifying ‘peer review’ of journal publications” Jonathan Eisen skillfully walks the reader through three realities of how peer review works with scientific journals:
I used to think that if you want to be taken seriously online, and if you want to actually participate in an ongoing dialog with a sponsor or other participants, you need to post using your own name and identity so that others know who you are.
This deal between Elsevier and Google may be further evidence of how disruptive the web has become to traditional publishing, research institutions, and professional membership associations. Web access and the proliferation of systems offering collaboration opportunities via social media and social networking are forcing management to make tough decisions about how much to give away for free and how much to restrict to paying customers.
Marketing, customer communications, and inside-the-firewall collaboration are not the only processes subject to "disruption" by social media and social networking. The worlds of research, scholarly communication, librarianship, and publishing are also being impacted, and not just by Google.