The article I looked at is "Reinventing academic publishing online" at the First Monday journal. Brian Whitworth and Rob Friedman argue for a change in academic publishing, describing the present journal publication system as feudal in regard to knowledge exchange. Their concern is specifically with the computing and information systems (IS) disciplines, and they examine how the traditional journal publication practice has squandered the fields' academic and theoretical potential.

Problems with the traditional journal publishing route are: small readership, slow article gestation, small dissemination, conservatism, subject-specialized, and geared toward career advancement and business over pure knowledge dissemination. The authors also point out the conflation of "rigor" with "quality," arguing that rigor alone stifles theories and new ideas, eventually signaling the end of the journal itself. The conservatism charge is especially potent; the authors highlight how a seemingly dated idea like media richness theory (MRT), "which links 'rich' media to rich interactions," which has been challenged by the successes of email and text messages over predicted successes like video chat, is still prominent.

They argue that IS, as a relatively new and cross-disciplinary field, has been hit especially hard. The sentiment that theory is worthless while practice alone is sufficient has its origins, they argue, in this dated publication model that cannot afford to nurture or entertain young theories or new researchers. New ideas are then frequently manifested by practitioners in the commercial realm. While this isn't bad, it could be better; the authors believe theory and practice have a synergistic relationship.

As others have noted stagnation and hardening of ideas is not a new problem, nor is institutional self-interest, but digital publication and digital curation of articles and research at least promise a faster cycle, or more Kuhn-type revolutions per decade, or some speeding up of ideas and counter ideas. The authors will likely get into this in future parts (this is Part I), but it is interesting that they associate so much of what is problematic with current scholarly publishing with the old analog model. It's a lot of weight to put on digital journals alone, and I bet some of the solution will be allocated to an open-access policy along with digital publication.

Since the authors believe knowledge flowers at the crossroads of various disciplines, it seems especially important that data sharing and curation be robust there. This makes me concerned for metadata interoperability; it seems significantly harder to administrate a repository that contains an article with datasets on historical music composition, music composition algorithms, and network technology, or some other convergence of disciplines and data, and then facilitate sharing of this data with data from other fields. Add to this the authors' dissatisfaction with specialized cross-disciplinary journals ("intersection journals") like International Journal of Computational Models and Algorithms in Medicine (IJCMAM). For the authors a journal like this "satisfies the need of the many to publish, but retains the tradition of dividing knowledge into artificial and disconnected fiefdoms." This seems to put a lot of weight on the shoulders of digital publication, collection and curation since these practices will be partially responsible for breaking down these "artificial fiefdoms" with interoperable, open metadata and highlighting how one study informs another.