Innovation must be accompanied by education

When Apple launched the iPod, the company had to put a lot of effort into educating people about digital music.

Mr. Jobs pulled the white, rectangular device out of the front pocket of his jeans and held it up for the audience. Polite applause. Many looked like they didn’t get it.

That was just fine with Mr. Jobs. They’d understand soon enough.

Apple had to inform the mass market that digital downloads could be legal (remember Napster?). They had to let people know how much music you could have with you. They had to let people know about the iTunes store. Without all those pieces of the puzzle, the iPod would have tanked.

I was reminded of these scene when Timothy Verstynan asked:

Why can’t we have a scientific journal where, instead of PDFs, papers are published as @ProjectJupyter notebooks (say using Binders), with full access to the data & code used to generate the figures/main results? What current barriers are preventing that?

I follow scientific publishing at a moderate level. I write about it. I’m generally interested in it. And I have no idea what Jupyter notebooks and binders are. If I don’t know about it, I can guarantee that nobody else in my department will have the foggiest idea.

This is a recurring problem with discussions around reforming or innovating in scientific publishing. The level of interest and innovation and passion around new publication ideas just doesn’t reach a wide community.

I think that this is because those people interested might undervalue the importance of educating other scientists about their ideas. Randy Olson talks a lot about how scientists are cheapskates with their communications budgets. They just don’t think it¤s important, and assume the superiority of the ideas will carry the day.

I’ve talked with colleagues about open access many times, and discover over and over that people have huge misconceptions about what open access is and how it works. And open access is something that has been around for a decade and has been written about a lot.

Publishing reformers drop the iPod, but don’t do the legwork to tell people how the iPod works.

So to answer Timothy’s initial question: the current barrier is ignorance.