Scholarship and Information Subsidy

Scholarly communication is being disrupted. As I have argued elsewhere, open-access journals are a disruptive innovation as Clayton Christensen would use the term.1 But the Internet and related digital technologies open an opportunity for all forms of scholarly communication to be disrupted. These disruptive innovations will make the vehicles for communicating scholarship faster, easier, and cheaper. Though it is not clear which business models will support these innovative ventures, it is clear that many of the established scholarly communication players are becoming obsolete—or, at a minimum, their roles are diminishing. As this change plays out, established institutions and firms will battle to preserve their roles and also the dollars they extract from the system while new entrants will struggle to find the resources they need even if the products and services they offer are superior. Read More