(Continuation from November 9)
Possibly one of the more impressive features of the broader world of publishing is the degree to which users are now involved as contributors of content. Here are just a few examples; Thad McIlroy's collage of resources on www.futureofpublishing.com is worth reviewing for additional pointers to the evolution of publishing as we knew it.
2. Commentators on the announcement of automatic captioning of English-language YouTube videos speculated that user-submitted captions for non-English language videos might not be far behind.
3. Stanford University students may now submit their dissertations directly to Google instead of or in addition to submitting it for a fee to ProQuest. A representative from that company in my audience raised the matter of value-add features such as indexing, guaranteed preservation, and more - and I completely agree those features are worthwhile; however it is a practical option for students to consider letting Google hold their work in its growing global repository. (See "Google publishes Stanford dissertations online" in the 16 November 2009 San Francisco Chronicle http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/16/BA721AK4NV.DTL&type=printable.)
4. International scientist Michael Nielsen comments: "What’s new today is the flourishing of an ecosystem of startups that are experimenting with new ways of communicating research, some radically different to conventional journals. Consider Chemspider, the excellent online database of more than 20 million molecules, recently acquired by the Royal Society of Chemistry. Consider Mendeley, a platform for managing, filtering and searching scientific papers … or consider startups like SciVee (YouTube for scientists), the Public Library of Science … and dozens more. And then there are companies like Wordpress, Friendfeed and Wikimedia that weren’t started with science in mind, but are increasingly helping scientists communicate their research." (MichaelNielsen.org blog "Is Scientific Publishing about to be Disrupted?" June 29, 2009)
What do such new types of publishing scenarios mean for information professionals' work?
(To be continued)
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