Emerging Trends on Video

Rich has already mentioned that he and I were at a Seminar organised by Allen Press on “Emerging Trends in Scholarly Publishing” at the beginning of April. If anyone is interested Allen Press has made the presentations available on their website.

Most of these are the presenters slides but the keynote speech from Jaron Lanier and the panel discussion in which I took part – along with Jaron and David Baldwin from the Ecological Society of America – are videos. I have watched my contributions in abject horror, which is my standard reaction when seeing or hearing myself speak; especially in public when I wave my hands about so much that I look like a demented windmill. Despite that there are plenty of interesting points raised and answers given.

The seminar as a whole confirmed just how much is changing in publishing at the moment and just how fast publishers are going to have to adapt if they don’t want to become marginalised and irrelevant. In addition to Jaron’s thought provoking ideas, the high points had to be John Wilbanks‘s slick presentation on the need for a Science Commons; Josh Greenberg’s demonstration of Zotero (which was new to me); and Konrad Förstner’s description of a virtual drinks reception held during a virtual conference held on the Second Nature island in Second Life.