If right now every esoteric scholar/scientist were to make available on the Net, in a public ftp or http archive, the preprint of every paper he wrote from this day forward, the rest would take care of itself.
Predictor: Harnad, Stevan
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 research paper published in Managing Information, Stevan Harnad of the University of Southampton writes about the coming revolution in the publishing of scholarly research and commentary:”Most papers by scholars and scientists are written for and read by only a small number of fellow specialists. Yet the economics of paper publication have until now forced this writing to be treated as if it were ordinary trade publication, in which the author is selling his words as a source of income. The benefits of scholarly publication are much more indirect than that; they take the form of influence and prestige … the sole objective of esoteric publication is to reach the eyes and minds of one’s peers, not to derive revenue from disseminating one’s text … In the era of paper publication, the trade/esoteric distinction could not be made because both forms of publication cost a lot of money, and those costs needed to be recovered through the sale of the product. So both the trade author and the esoteric author had to be prepared to make a Faustian bargain with the paper publisher (who was not, by the way, the devil either, but likewise a victim of the bargain; the only devil would have been the Blind Watchmaker who designed our planet and its means of publication until the advent of the electronic publication era). The bargain was Faustian because everyone benefits from lower costs, so if there had been a way to get the product straight from the author’s pen to the reader’s eye (so to speak), without the mediation of the costly and cumbersome technology of paper, everyone would have been the merrier … Now esoteric publishing can shake free of the expensive and inefficient paper technology for the dissemination of esoteric knowledge and take flight into the free and friendly skies of Scholarly Skywriting … Here is all it would take to bring down the (esoteric) paper house of cards very quickly: If right now every esoteric scholar/scientist were to make available on the Net, in a public ftp or http archive, the preprint of every paper he wrote from this day forward, the rest would take care of itself, and in short order, as Paul Ginsparg’s remarkable and historic physics preprint archive already heralds.”
Biography:Stevan Harnad was a professor and researcher in the United Kingdom in the 1990s. He made predictions about the future of electronic publishing, including his article “Electronic Scholarly Publication: Quo Vadis” (1995). (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)?
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: Publishing
Name of publication: Managing Information
Title, headline, chapter name: Electronic Scholarly Publication: Quo Vadis
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad95.quo.vadis.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney