The non-glamorous side of disrupting an industry

3 points

14 years ago

My name's Brian. I'm doing a PhD in Sociology at the University of Chicago. Academia is a mess of contradictions. It's a fantastic place with brilliant, quick witted people, and at the same time chock-full of irrationality. Here's an example: academic produce work, give it to publishers for free, and then have it sold back to them at a huge markup. How does this work? Academics do a lot of work for free. They serve as journal editors for free. They peer review knowledge for free. They copyedit and improve collections of articles to publish...for free. These collections of articles are then handed off to huge corporate entities that sell this research back to university libraries for billions. Yep, effing billions. The disgust with the current system has even made it to the popular media: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/science/researchers-boycott-elsevier-journal-publisher.html, http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/23/2969913/harvard-library-advisory-council-journal-open-access, and http://www.economist.com/node/18744177/.

About a year ago two colleagues of mine and I decided to do something about it - fight the good fight, disrupt an industry, rah-rah-rah. While our backgrounds are in Sociology, Political Philosophy, and History, we also happen to have the know-how to develop web apps. So we created Scholastica (www.ScholasticaHQ.com), a platform that allows any scholar to create, manage, and publish their own academic journals. We give scholars the infrastructure to accept submissions, find reviewers, get articles reviewed, get decisions made on these articles, and then get them published online. You can see an example of what a journal running on Scholastica looks like, here: http://scholasticahq.com/the-scholastica-example-journal

While our app isn't perfect by any means and there are still problems to solve, you would think it'd be easy to get people to notice us, especially in that academics are complaining ad nauseum that they hate the current system, right? Wrong. While we're enabling any scholar to set up their own journal and manage it how scholars want, sites like PeerJ (which is only a single journal and not even out yet) have gotten into every publication imaginable. I guess that's what it's like to have Tim O'Reilly in your corner. Academics who aren't even in the bio/medical sciences are talking about PeerJ though it doesn't affect their field. The mind boggles.

The moral of this story is you should find a need, try to solve it, and realize you still have to knock on every door in order to get the people you want to help to realize you've spent a great deal of time trying to provide a solution to the thing they're always complaining about. We've had some great feedback and some early adopters which have made a difference, but our experience reiterates the tech startup heuristic "If you build it, they won't come" – at least not in droves, and not until some big names adopt the platform first.

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