There's a lot of disruption these days in the publishing world, and particularly within the specialized field of academic publishing, where scholarly journals are catching up to the "which way do we go?" angst of the newspaper industry circa 2007-09.
Like other publishers, they're trying to determine the best way to receive value for their content, only in their case, advertising has never been a big part of the equation (hence the high cost of these publications). Should they be print only? Should they limit web access to subscribers? Or should they realize that the Web is hostile to bundling, and learn ways to unbundle their content profitably?
All publishers will need to grasp this point eventually, but scientific publishers should be the first to do so. When it comes to bundling, the ultimate bundle is the document.
Hence, the ultimate unbundling is the creation of machine-readable systems that publish not only documents, but deeper information structures based on facts and relationships between facts.
This is where the future lies: In creating and fielding such systems, but also in developing the value exchanges they represent.
I believe the day will come when "owning your own data" will mean copyrighting an RDF triple as your unique intellectual property -- and getting paid for its every use. The first company to figure out ways to profit by brokering such exchanges will be a happy company indeed.
(Thanks to Bora Z for the link.)
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