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I think scholarly publishing is good for society because we let the researchers, the scholars,
the scientists do their work while we take care of the business of disseminating the
information.
I would say we aggregate. We validate. We curate. We disseminate. We're in the business
of making information actionable.
Scholarly publishers bring so much value to society. They are the curators of innovation
and knowledge. They take research behind the innovation in its rawest form and refine it
to make it shareable with society and for the benefit of the larger population.
Scholarly publishers help to manage objective third party validation of research claims.
In addition, they help to direct research to the places it needs to go and they help
to add context to that research that makes it meaningful and important to people who
use it.
In the industry, there's a lot of pressure, I think, to reduce costs and to change the
model, and what I like about scholarly publishers is that they go with it. They're like,"Oh,
okay, open access? That might work." Let's see if we can have a sustainable publishing
model there and still allow people to do their research, still allow them to get tenure credit,
and still allow the public to learn about what needs to be learned. So, I think scholarly
publishing has been very adaptable, compared to a lot of industries that have kind of disappeared.
Time is a researcher's most precious commodity, so there's so many things they have to do
that anything that they can sort of outsource or format or have someone else do is such
a huge time-saver for them and lets them do their real work, which is learning more about
this world. So what we do is we provide a set of vital services they absolutely need
to communicate their results.
Scholarly publishing is my opportunity, my own small little way, to give back to the
world, basically, which sounds very grandiose, but there are people out there doing fantastic
research; medicine, whatever it might be, and I can't do any of that stuff, but what
I can do is to help them to do their job better by helping them find the information they
need.
Knowledge creators obviously play a crucial role in the whole culture of civilization
that we enjoy, but those who are maintaining that knowledge, who are curating it, who are
disseminating it, these people are providing huge added value and those are your scholarly
publishers. So, the value that they're providing is immense.