How Science Publishing Works

I've become a big fan of the online comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weiner.

I especially enjoyed his treatment today of the Least Publishable Unit.

Society Doesn’t Need Newspapers

It's a bit sobering when a 146 year-old newspaper like the Seattle PI holds the presses for good and goes web-only. With this in mind, Clay Shirky's Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable is a very smart analysis of our planet's current move from paper to pixels. My favorite quote:

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

Steven Berlin Johnson's Old Growth Media and the Future of News makes a fine companion piece, and offers some upsides:

In fact, I think in the long run, we’re going to look back at many facets of old media and realize that we were living in a desert disguised as a rain forest.

Newspaper publishers are not the only ones taking trembling steps to digital publication. Most scientific journals, including the ones I write, review and edit for, are also somewhere along this path. This is an especially acute issue for learned societies that have long relied upon journal revenues as their cash cow. Finding an economic model that will pay for the stuff we need to read is going to take a lot of trial and error. On the plus side, it should be a great time for radical forces (such as myself) to try out all sorts of wacky experiments in radiology publishing. As Shirky concludes:

Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.

(via Daring Fireball)