the journal article as palimpsest

One of the big challenges for academic libraries and publishers is that the journal article is becoming the central object or atom of information.  In the academic world it's much less about books and now, not even so much about journals, as about the article itself.  This is not least of which because articles are brief enough that they can circulate well through download and it is feasible to either print them or read them on screen.

What that means is we need to think of more article-centric ways to present information.  Leigh Dodds calls this The Scientific Paper as Palimpsest, in a presentation given to the Ingenta Publisher forum.

In the presentation I tried to highlight some of the possibilities that could become available if academic publishers begin to share more metadata about the content they publish, ideally by engaging with the scientific community to expose "raw" data and results.

via iSpecies blog

Comments

[Thom Hickey]

Some of us saw this coming quite a while ago. See Hickey, Thomas B. The Journal in the Year 2000. Wilson Library Bulletin. December 1981.

--Th