After almost twenty years of publishing on the world wide web, the development of social media and many other tools, the fundamental appearance of journal articles has remained remarkably unchanged. Is this merely conservatism or the forces of reaction? Is it a generational thing? This paper posits that the lack of fundamental change has much more to do with the behavioural goals of the vast majority of practising researchers than with any rejection of technology.
MICHAEL MABE is Chief Executive Officer of the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (known as STM) and has over thirty years’ experience of academic publishing. After growing up on the Sussex coast of England, he read chemistry and did research into Carbon Dating at Oxford University, joining Oxford University Press in 1980. Prior to leading STM he held a number of senior publishing and management positions at Pergamon Press and Elsevier. Michael is a Visiting Professor in Information Studies at University College London and at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA, and speaks and writes regularly about the academic publishing system. Since 2008 he has been Chair of and publisher representative on the PEER Project, a major multi-stakeholder European Union-funded research study of the effects of systematic Green Open Access on researchers, libraries, publishers, journals and repositories which will report its behavioural, economic and usage results in 2012.
