Inside (Publishing) Baseball [Idea Machines #12]

In this episode I talk to William Gunn about the guts of science publishing, changing incentives in science, and the relationship between publishing and funding.

William is currently the Director of Scholarly Communication at Elsevier. He joined Elsevier when they acquired Mendeley, which is a platform designed to help researchers share papers and notes about them. Before that he was an academic researcher himself and, for a time, a professional chef.

Key Takeaways

• Science publishers aren't idiots - they realize that the internet is making anything free that can be free and are trying to adjust their business models accordingly.
• The metrics we use to judge research innovation are starting to shift and interestingly that is speeding up the "speciesation" of fields.
• Science has shifted more towards "big science" - big teams with big funding doing big experiments. However, there may be room to discover many more things if we put more focus on smaller projects.

Resources

• William on Twitter @MrGunn
• Mendeley - a platform for sharing science
• Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?
• Diminishing Returns from Science