Poster: Dissemination through Disintermediation Richard Fyson University of Southampton, UK rwf1v07@soton.ac.uk Dr Simon Coles University of Southampton, UK S.J.Coles@soton.ac.uk Dr Les Carr University of Southampton, UK lac@ecs.soton.ac.uk ABSTRACT Thus far, the Web has had a disruptive impact on a range of industries, including academic publishing. But in many respects, it is business as usual; journal publishers control a significant portion of the market and charge significant fees for the content they provide, yet this content is produced, validated and consumed by the academic community, providing a perfect opportunity for disintermediation. Using practical-led sciences as a case study, this paper examines the hold journal publishers have on academic dissemination and how these factors may be exploited in encouraging disruptive innovations. Sourcing ideas from a range of literature, including game theory, knowledge management and collective behaviour, this paper goes on to propose some requirements from a system that might be used to encourage dissemination among scholars, before concluding on future work that may put some of these ideas to the test. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.4. [Information Systems Applications]: Communications Applications General Terms Management, Economics, Human Factors Keywords Academic publishing, disintermediation, game theory, knowledge management, collective behaviour 1. INTRODUCTION The disruptive nature of the Web has made its presence felt across a range of sectors. The entertainment industry has seen a dramatic change in the production and consumption of music and films; and newspaper publishers have adapted to new technologies and compete directly with the citizen journalist; to name just two examples. The impacts of disintermediation and perfect competition that the Web imposes can be very disruptive. Academic publishing has been significantly affected by the Web. Open access (OA) publishing is a disruptive innovation changing how scholarly works are accessed and distributed. However, as observed by Clay Shirky, summarised by Weller [9], it is function that matters, not the form (for example, the function of journalism which takes form in newspapers), when considering technological innovations. Whilst OA has caused some disruption, and looks set to continue impacting upon the academic publishing environment, OA alone does not disrupt the function of academic research, it simply changes its distribution and accessibility. The function - the dissemination of research - remains largely unaffected, with PDF articles replicating their paper counterparts and online journal websites and repositories performing similar roles as hardcopies of journals. Practical based sciences would stand much to gain from innovations in academic dissemination. They are typically practical-led, generate vast amounts of varying data and frequently involve collaborations, creating complex networks of stakeholders. The aim of this paper is to examine why the Web has failed to have a disruptive effect on the communication of research, which in turn affects the practice of research itself; and to propose recommendations which may elicit a positive, disruptive influence on the dissemination of research. 2. JOURNALS & DISINTERMEDIATION Journal publishers are powerful players in the market of scholarly communications, a role they have inherited from a time when publishing in journals was the only method to disseminate findings. The Web makes this role obsolete, yet journal publishers continue to charge significant fees for subscriptions to their journals, which it has been argued are limiting the progress of science. Harvard University recently claimed the scholarly communication environment is “fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive” [3]. The journal publishers’ persistence can be attributed to their publications’ impact factors; indices which attribute a degree of quality to a scholarly work and a metric used to ascertain the success of a publishing academic. However, it is arguable that impact factors, which are heavily dependent on citations from other papers, are a flawed metric which should not be so influential. For example the ISI Impact Factor does not accurately reflect the quality of all articles found within a journal: “the most cited half of the articles are cited, on average 10 times more often as the least cited half” [10]. The worth of the values given varies across disciplinary boundaries, complicating inter-disciplinary work; and journal impact factors also leave much scientific endeavour unaccounted for, with an estimate of 90% of scientific output being missed by impact indexes [8] as more work is published in Web-based outlets. There is a clear scope for disintermediation in this field, with academics responsible for all major steps in the dissemination process: they produce the content, validate it through peer review (another aspect of the publishing process which is considered by some to be flawed [6]) and ultimately consume it. At the heart of the problem lie researchers themselves and it is their concerns that need to be understood and addressed. The Web can be used to create models that go beyond the economic advantages of OA, allowing for peer-to-peer methods of networking and dissemination, placing researchers at the centre of dissemination. 3. PROPOSED REQUIREMENTS Using a range of literature on subjects such as epistemology, knowledge management, game theory and collective behaviour; alongside observations from questionnaire participants and Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Conference’10, Month 1–2, 2010, City, State, Country. Copyright 2010 ACM 1-58113-000-0/00/0010 …$15.00.