Jim Hendler, who has a long pedigree of Semantic Web activities, has posted a draft of an upcoming editorial piece about the future of academic publishing. Some of the interesting points:

• Comparing the success of sites like Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, etc., against many similar endeavors with the same technology but nothing like the same success, shows that building community is a key component of sharing knowledge (which, ultimately, is what the academic process is supposed to accomplish).
• Despite many younger academics wanting the pursue a more “open” model of scholarship (and being familiar with the tools), the incentives are still strongly tilted toward traditional publication methods
• Change will likely come from more established researchers (whose careers are presumably less fragile) working to create innovation

Scientific innovation has substantially outpaced traditional academic publishing approaches for some time now (long before blogs and wikis made the tension even more obvious), and (like other kinds of publication) seems long overdue for some changes.

If you don’t quite get what microformats are or why anybody would care, here’s a quick way to get to “Aha!”:

• download the Operator add-on for Firefox
• visit a page with microformat content (like microformats.org or tantek.com) and look at your Operator toolbar

You’ll see icons for addresses, contacts, and events, each with a pull-down menu offering appropriate operations. For example, you can map an address, add a contact to your contact list, bookmark an event or save it in your calendar, etc. Even if i don’t necessarily want to add Tantek to my Outlook contacts, this clearly shows how easy these kinds of operations could be. Many web pages are full of little nuggets of useful information, nearly all of which currently require cut-and-paste to some other page to re-use them. Operator gives you a seriously cool look at what the web could do for us beyond just displaying prose and pictures.

I’d love to see somebody who knows how to program Firefox add-ons extend Operator to do the same thing for bibleref markup (along the same lines as Chris Roberts’ WordPress plug-in or the Holy Scripturizer plug-in). This would make it easy to provide a menu of options like looking up the passage at the ESV site, BibleGateway, your favorite Scripture site, or inside Logos Bible Software, for all the embedded Bible references on any web page.