What will this mean for academic journals?Harvard wants to Web-publish the research of faculty members, and other schools will inevitably follow.Will this kill off academic journals? Not all of them.
The smarter ones could adapt with better-than-ever peer review procedures and maybe even use a blog approach. They could link to the best research and also comment on the worst, while offering far, far more depth than a blog would.
Perhaps in the future, professors and grad students be judged partly by the reception they get from trustworthy sources online. I can even see link-related algorithms to help quantify this. The more links you get, and the better the numerical ratings, the more valuable your paper could be in your quest for tenure. I’d hate to see everything reduced to numbers. But this could be yet another tool. Who knows? Maybe a Google research team is already at work on these matters.
One other suggestion would be for the academic journals to try more multimedia, online conferences, wikis and other alternatives to the static text to which they’re partial now. It’s time for academic journals to learn to love the Web.
Related: Media Commons Project from the Institute for the Future of the Book.
See my previous post on this here.
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