An Exercise In Irrelevance » Blog Archive » Kblog Has Been Compromised
Knowledgeblog works but lacks a business model
So, where does this leave us? Is the whole idea of knowledgeblog broken? Personally, I do not think so. While I have been critical of the cost associated with academic publishing, I am aware that it cannot happen for free. Running and maintaining a web server takes money; it is something that we have been doing on a shoe-string for a while, especially since our JISC money ran out. In the couple of years that we have run knowledgeblog, I think that we have learned and shown a lot. As well as page views and content, we have shown that scientific publishing can be easy for the author; that we can generate attractive articles this way; that we can start to embed computational accessible knowledge into these articles. We have shown that we can do peer-review, if we need. We have shown we can archive and preserve for the future. We have shown that knowledgeblog is good for grey literature. We have added DOIs. Multiple authors. Good looking maths. We even have some preliminary stats on how much publication costs from Word doc to website.
At the moment, though, we do not have a business model. It is clear that if we are to move this forward, it needs to be run as a service, managed, and looked after, something which is neither my expertise or desire. The analogy that I have made earlier with Wikipedia is, I think, a good one; it would be good to move this into a foundation status.