The future of Scientific Publishing....?

•   A recent post on "Homologus - Frontier in Bioinformatics" highlights some of the economic issues surrounding scientific publishing and raises some provocative questions of what the future will be like - for example:

           (in 10 years time: "......Suppose the academic journals did not exist and young scientists of  today wanted to build an infrastructure to communicate effectively. Will they create the expensive journals, work for them for free and then get their articles locked up? That does not make sense at all. We expect the publication model of ten years later to be completely distributed and it will use all benefits of ‘online publication’ rather than recreating paper publication as web text. Also, we expect search engines and social communities to be the primary sources useful information. A newly uploaded arxiv paper explores those aspects regarding twitter...."

• and The Economist of 4 May 2013 presents an article entitled:  Academic publishing: Free-for-all - Open-access scientific publishing is gaining ground and outlines recent developments in mandatory open access requirements by various bodies - e.g. Research Councils UK, and the  European Union
• The issue of who pays for open access publishing is discussed in a May 3rd post on the Smithsonian Institute blog