Citizendium Blog

I gave the keynote last Thursday at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Scholarly Publishing, “Imagining the Future: Scholarly Communication 2.0,” in San Francisco.  The speech was called “What Strong Collaboration Means for Scholarly Publishing.”  I had a great time there, met Brewster Kahle and various other interesting people.

Here are the opening paragraphs:

When I was asked to speak to you, the Society for Scholarly Publishing, I have to admit that I found this puzzling, because I don’t know anything about scholarly publishing. Why should someone who knows so little about scholarly publishing be asked to give a speech to the Society for Scholarly Publishing? That’s a paradox.

I found a similar paradox in an article by John Thompson in the Chronicle of Higher Education from 2005. Thompson wrote: “academic publishers can survive today only if they become something other than academic publishers” (June 17, 2005).

The quote actually explains why I’m here. I’m here because I can tell you about a way to become something other than academic publishers. I suppose this is a little absurd, but as a philosopher, I am trained to take joy in life’s little absurdities.

So I’m going to try to make the case that scholarly publishers should start expert Web 2.0 projects. Here’s my plan for the talk.

•  I’m going to begin by painting a picture, a vision of what information online could look like in ten or twenty years. In short, I’m going to build a castle in the air. But then I will try to put a foundation underneath it.
• I’ll go over a number of examples of free encyclopedia projects from which we can learn.
• Then I’ll draw out some general principles.
• I’ll consider various business models for projects started by scholarly publishers.
• Finally, I’ll give you some ideas for projects you might start.

More here.

Wednesday I’ll be at my alma mater, Reed College, giving another speech, this time for the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges.