The editors of Wiley-Blackwell's Journal News recently asked CrossRef Executive Director Ed Pentz and Director of Strategic initiatives Geoff Bilder to look back over the 10 years of CrossRef's existence and forward for another 10 years at the scholarly communication landscape.
What of the past? Ed Pentz, CrossRef's Executive Director, identifies cross-publisher collaboration as the single most surprising (and effective) development in creating the CrossRef organization and the linking service that "improved the experience for readers of online scholarly content." Such collaboration and the network effects of many participants joining together are also necessary to make newer developments, such as reference linking for books and the CrossCheck plagiarism screening service, valuable.
And the future? Researchers practice "reading avoidance," so the role of scholarly communications should be to help them invest their time wisely, says Bilder. The paradox, he explains, is that scholarly authors spend time turning data into reading material, but their readers want to turn prose into manipulable data. Asked to speculate on the future of journals and books, he predicts that semantic web technologies will allow them to do just that.
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