“Disruption” is what happens when a different technology develops to a point where it does what yours does well enough to meet the needs of your customers. That means that, when customers switch, you can’t compete without changing your product completely.
There’s a brilliant essay by Michael Nielsen from 2009 which predicted that disruption in academic publishing was imminent. It’s still worth a read, even now.
Reflecting on Nielsen’s essay in 2016, Michael Clarke observed that the web was created at CERN for the purpose of communicating scientific research. The web has, since then, disrupted every industry on the planet except the one for communicating scientific research.
I feel like there’s something quite profound about that, isn’t there? What makes this industry so different — so resilient to change? Is it just good luck?
Disruption in publishing
It seems clear that the rapid growth of OA journals from 2010 onwards could be described as “disruptive”. But it isn’t really a different technology. The processes in OA publication are still broadly the same as the processes in traditional publishing and traditional publishers have mostly maintained their market positions (as well as offering their own OA services).
But here’s a thought: I said that OA journals don’t simply sell authors lines on their CVs. But there is a different industry that actually does explicitly sell authors a new line for their CV. That industry is different to the publishing industry and it does the task well enough that tens of thousands of authors choose to use it every year. As an added bonus for the authors, getting a line on their CV from a papermill is cheaper, faster and easier than doing a whole research project, writing it up, and getting it published.
A lot of the people who want that service aren’t even researchers. They aren’t our customers and the service isn’t something we can (or ever would) offer. So, unlike other disruptive scenarios, there’s no option to compete.
So, is fraud disruption?
Hiding in plain sight
Good luck strikes again. There are a lot of industries affected by fraud. Some of those industries, like finance and cyber security have interesting parallels. But, as far as I can tell, we have the only industry where people who commit fraud have to actually publish details of what they did in a perpetually available and open form. That makes finding them a lot easier! What are the odds?!
I’ve said before that I think the key to solving this problem is peer-review. When you already have the best tool for the job, the best thing you can do is support that system. Automated services come into it too, like the (award-winning!) Papermill Alarm. Here’s how it works:
- The Papermill Alarm screens every paper submitted to a journal and provides a risk-rating.
- Editors can then choose to investigate the paper, or simply get good referees to look at it.
- Our data shows that this is a simple, low-cost, and effective solution to the problem.
- Contact us for access :)
But the point is that there always needs to be a human in the loop. The fact that ‘just get good referees’ is an effective solution to the papermill problem on its own, is another example of good luck. It’s a massive problem that can be solved by supporting and developing a system that already exists and works well.
There is no other industry so resilient to change, no other industry where fraudsters can’t hide and no other industry where there is a vast sea of talented specialists ready to advise. Disrupted or not, with luck like this, we should have a lot of optimism about the future.
