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The business models that will emerge in science will be as diverse as the ones on the web at large. There will be advertising businesses; freemium models; and e

The business models that will emerge in science will be as diverse as the ones on the web at large. There will be advertising businesses; freemium models; and enterprise sales models. I'm not sure who the author thinks the customers for these services will be. Perhaps universities will pay for access but I guarantee you faculty and students will not. I also can't imagine advertisers paying much to target academics, a small and not particularly unique demographic. In short, I just don't see how these sites hope to generate any revenue. Academia is an incredibly difficult market to get money out of and even if you're going to sell at the university level you're talking about a massive sales effort that is going to take years to yield results (think Blackboard). As other have said here journals are going to end up being open-access and free. Many of them will probably end being run by well endowed university presses (e.g. MIT press).

ivan_ah 14y ago
> I just don't see how these sites hope to generate any revenue. Good point. The academic publishing "sector" is definitely a very interesting domain and there is a lot of POWER in knowledge, but it is not clear what the role of a startup company would be in there. We could bring cool new technology but without wide adoption tech is useless. Mr. Price is trying the generic (and by now annoying as hell) "social network for science" approach but it is not clear that having "likes" for papers inside the academia.edu walled garden do anything for science. What is cool is the tremendous opportunity for better scientific discovery applications and the organization of knowledge. Hopefully at some point Mr. Price will //do// something interesting on that front instead of spending his time in PR mode writing guest posts for tech news sites. @Richard: Sorry bro, but the "sign up to see the PDF" really pissed me off the other day so you are in the bad books until you change that. Not cool. My guess is that the future of dissemination looks a lot like the arXiv (self-service, cheap) and that a peer review system can be bolted on top of it. Prof. Gowers was recently mentioned he heard of an initiative to build "arXiv overlay journals" [1]. [1] http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/why-ive-also-joined-the-good-guys/ http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/why-ive-also-joined-t...

ivan_ah 14y ago

> I just don't see how these sites hope to generate any revenue. Good point. The academic publishing "sector" is definitely a very interesting domain and there is a lot of POWER in knowledge, but it is not clear what the role of a startup company would be in there. We could bring cool new technology but without wide adoption tech is useless. Mr. Price is trying the generic (and by now annoying as hell) "social network for science" approach but it is not clear that having "likes" for papers inside the academia.edu walled garden do anything for science. What is cool is the tremendous opportunity for better scientific discovery applications and the organization of knowledge. Hopefully at some point Mr. Price will //do// something interesting on that front instead of spending his time in PR mode writing guest posts for tech news sites. @Richard: Sorry bro, but the "sign up to see the PDF" really pissed me off the other day so you are in the bad books until you change that. Not cool. My guess is that the future of dissemination looks a lot like the arXiv (self-service, cheap) and that a peer review system can be bolted on top of it. Prof. Gowers was recently mentioned he heard of an initiative to build "arXiv overlay journals" [1]. [1] http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/why-ive-also-joined-the-good-guys/ http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/why-ive-also-joined-t...