Major changes are afoot in the world of academic publishing, exemplified by innovations in publishing platforms, new approaches to metrics, improvements in our approach to peer review, and a focus on developing and encouraging open access to scientific literature and data. The FAIR acronym recommends that authors and publishers should aim to make their output Findable, Accessible, Interoperable...

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Some species change little over long periods and then suddenly (at least on geological timescales) yield evolutionary innovations or diversify in creating new species. This herky-jerky relationship between time and change is known in evolutionary terms as punctuated equilibrium. Take, for instance, two extremes: the royal fern and the African cichlid fish. A time-traveling biologist visiting th...

In the design of authoring systems in electronic publishing a great challenge is to what extent the author is able, can be enabled and is willing to structure the contribution her/himself. After all, all information that is denotated properly in the writing stage enhances the retrievability later on. Metadata are the crucial ingredients. Hence, prior to design and experiment is the need for a f...

It is clear that we cannot disentangle the question of what the scientific journal will look like in twenty years’ time from the question of what the university and academia will look like. The pressures of competitive, individual research assessment, within an increasingly marketized world of higher education, would indicate a future of science publishing that is more closed, more niche, more ...

Learned societies have become aligned with commercial publishers, who have increasingly taken over the latter’s function as independent providers of scholarly information. Using the example of geographical societies, the advantages and disadvantages of this trend are examined. It is argued that in an era of digital publication, learned societies can offer leadership with a new model of open acc...

LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) is a prototype of a system to preserve access to scientific journals published on the Web. It is a majority-voting fault-tolerant system that, unlike normal systems, has far more replicas than would be required just to survive the anticipated failures. We are exploring techniques that exploit the surplus of replicas to permit a much looser form of coordin...