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What's stopping a startup from disrupting the academic publishing industry?

8 points by ianterrell ↗ HN
With the boycotting of Elsevier and the numerous other complaints about the industry I've seen over the last half year here, I wonder: Why doesn't a startup nonprofit completely demolish the pay-to-play publishing industry overnight?

The technology is painfully simple. What non-tech hurdles exist that make this a hard industry to own?

5 comments

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mcrider
There are many non-tech hurdles; The most significant to me being that the most reputable journals are behind the paywall, and academics is all about reputation. My organization, the Public Knowledge Project (http://pkp.sfu.ca), provides all the tools needed for academic publishing, but we're only recently getting some serious traction.
glimcat
Yes. The obstacles are primarily cultural, not technical. You need to impedance match both simultaneously in order to break in, and ??? to seriously disrupt the entrenched players.
molsongolden
Hey that is cool that you are with the PKP. I stumbled across your Open Journals project last year. I think I was looking for academic journals covering economics in Nepal and one of the only ones I found was using your system. I was pretty excited about the open journal concept but I agree that prestige and reputation are huge barriers that will be difficult to overcome. The most promising areas might be niche journals covering new areas.
impendia
Simple. Because it's not in any academic's pure self-interest, acting alone, to stop publishing in for-profit journals.

It is the "tragedy of the commons". Take overfished waters, for example. It would be beneficial for all the fishermen if they only took half as many fish, but it would not be beneficial for any individual fishermen to do so.

Thus, someone has to take the lead (thank you Tim Gowers!)

pasbesoin
In the U.S., at least: "Publish or perish".

There's a lot of momentum built up around the existing system/players, and a significant portion of that has a direct influence on careers. (I'm not arguing for said role of entrenched interests to continue, particularly at the prices they currently demand. But changing is not just a matter of free PDF's.)

P.S. I'm outside any role in said "industry", but as my perspective on it.