Disruptive Innovation in Scientific Publishing: Directory of Open Access Journals

Rich Apodaca — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 14:24:00 +0000

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) currently lists 2420 Open Access scholarly journals. Of these, 52 currently fall under the category of chemistry. Although the organic chemistry subcategory only currently lists three journals, the general chemistry category actually contains several journals containing organic chemistry content, such as the Bulletin of the Korean Chemical Society, Chemical and Pharmaceutical Bulletin, and Molbank.

Clearly, the chemistry journals included in DOAJ's listings would not be considered to be in "the mainstream" by experts in the field. And that's exactly the point. Innovation always happens at the margins.

As Clayton Christensen puts it in his landmark book, The Innovator's Dilemma:

As we shall see, the list of leading companies that failed when confronted with disruptive changes in technology and market structure is a long one. ... One theme common to all of these failures, however, is that the decisions that led to failure were made when the leaders in question were widely regarded as among the best companies in the world.

Replacing the word "company" with "scientific journal" leads to an important hypothesis about the future of scientific publishing.

And on the subject of disruptive innovation itself, Christensen writes:

Occasionally, however, disruptive technologies emerge: innovations that result in worse product performance, at least in the near-term. Ironically, in each of the instances studied in this book, it was disruptive technologies that precipitated the leading firms' failure.

It seems very unlikely that scientific publishing operates according to a different set of rules than any other technology-driven business. The coming wave of disruptive innovation will be dramatic, and the outcome completely predictable.

Making the Case

Rich Apodaca — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 13:56:00 +0000

The SMIREP system is available from http://www.karwath.org/systems/smirep/ under the GNU General Public License. The Web page also contains the data files used in the Experimental Section. The system is provided in Python and C source code, including the required Python OpenBabel module OBGrep.

-Andreas Karwath and Luc De Raedt, J. Chem. Inf. Model ASAP Articles

Karwath and De Raedt are onto something more than just an innovative use of SMILES strings. When the majority of chemical informatics papers provide instructions for downloading both complete source code and complete data sets, the game will have changed forever. Advocating this postion in essays, presentations, emails, and letters is one way to make the case, and a very old one at that. For your next paper, why not make the case with a statement like the one above?

Depth-First: Tag publishing

Disruptive Innovation in Scientific Publishing: Directory of Open Access Journals

Making the Case