Graduating from publishing platforms to researcher-oriented pipelines

Abstract

The scholarly publishing industry has, in many ways, fallen behind the needs of the researchers it serves. We have continued to deliver journal articles as online replicas of their print counterparts, missing the opportunity to use digital technologies to deliver a richer representation of the research process and construct a more authoritative scholarly record.We have developed a discontinuous archipelago of publication websites and then waited for Google to build bridges and for governments to build aggregations. Researchers frustratingly encounter separate logins, separate searches, and separate emailed content alerts-all of which are also ineffective for publishers.As a result, traffic is flowing onto aggregator and pirate websites that are more convenient for researchers to use. According to data from digital market intelligence company SimilarWeb, of the top ten scholarly websites, only five are operated by publishers; two-thirds of the traffic is on non-publisher-hosted websites, three of which are pirate sites. *