4 ms·
If you're doing a startup trying to innovate in the research and academic journal space I'd love to talk to you. I've put out requests for contact in HN comment
by dougmccune 10y ago
If you're doing a startup trying to innovate in the research and academic journal space I'd love to talk to you. I've put out requests for contact in HN comment threads like this before and gotten great responses and great conversations, and one even resulted in a funding round.
I'm a shareholder and board member of SAGE Publications, which was founded by my grandparents. SAGE is about the 5th largest journal publisher and is and will remain a private family-owned company. I know it's hard to believe, but publishers aren't one homogenous evil entity plotting how to rip off the public. There are lots of fucked up things about the journal system, many of which publishers have caused or been complicit in. But there are also a lot of complicated factors that are entirely outside publishers' ability to change. Academia is a mess in a lot of ways, and much of the overall dysfunction of the whole system has manifested in what has become the hard to comprehend journal publishing system of today.
I live in Oakland and would love to meet up with anyone who happens to be in the Bay Area, or just have Skype calls no matter where you are. My contact info is in my HN profile. Drop me an email and I'd love to pick your brain to hear about how you're approaching academic publishing.
We've funded two startups in the last few years. PeerJ is an open access journal undercutting the traditional publishers AND most OA publishers (like PLOS) on price. Publons is trying to provide incentives for peer review and encourage openness in the peer review process. We'd love to find a few more good companies doing truly innovative stuff that will have an impact on academic publishing.
- wolfgke 10y ago> If you're doing a startup trying to innovate in the research and academic journal space I'd love to talk to you. Make contact with Alexandra Elbakyan. She clearly tries to bring innovation to the academic journal space (though not legal one).
- dougmccune 10y agoI emailed her to try to get her to speak (remotely) at a SAGE board meeting. Never heard back. I'd love to have her engage in a conversation with us.
- wolfgke 10y agoThis sounds fair. :-)
- dougmccune 10y agoConsidering she's being sued by Elsevier I don't fault her for not wanting to talk to any publishers. There probably isn't anything I can say that would convince her I'm not trying to entrap her in some way. But yeah, she's got an open invitation to an audience with the owners and upper management at SAGE, even if she just wanted to tell us off.
- dragandj 10y agoMaybe you did not offer a fair enough compensation for that service. She has lots of important work improving horrible state of scientific knowledge dissemination. I don't think she has much time for consulting private corporations, unless adequately compensated.
- mcrider 10y agoI used to work for the Public Knowledge Project (https://pkp.sfu.ca/ https://pkp.sfu.ca/) which has been directly impacting the Open Access movement for years. Not a sexy startup, but they have great reach and have helped many academics publish research papers openly since the early 2000's.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoGood work on both startups. Glad your firm is open to opportunities to improve the situation. I'll make a note of it in case I run into someone whose work might interest you.