Academic Publishers Do Not Understand the Internet

How to Change the Centuries-Old Model of Academic Publishing

Academic publishing has been slow to make use of social media, but new experiments could push the industry--and science--forward

Michael White | June 3, 2015

Back when I was a new graduate student, more than a dozen years ago, nearly all scientific journals in my field had a website, but that didn’t mean you could always get the papers you needed online. Often, I had to go to the library with a handful of quarters for the photocopier in order to get the print version of an article that was neither online nor pay-walled. Because this was time consuming, I would only do this for articles I really needed to read. If an article wasn't accessible online and didn't seem particularly important, I wouldn't bother to track it down—and I wouldn't cite it in my own work.
Publishers of academic journals, whose primary reason for existence is to facilitate communication between scientists, were clearly failing to take full advantage of the Internet to disseminate the papers they published. The situation has improved since then—I haven't used a library photocopier in years—but, in many ways, academic publishers still aren't taking full advantage of the possibilities offered by the Internet, especially the more recent developments in social media. Most academic journals, despite having Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, still look and operate much like a traditional print journal that has merely been transferred online.

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