It's not filter failure, it's a discovery deficit

Abstract

The web has changed our information-seeking behaviour radically, yet scholarly communication remains firmly embedded in the traditions of the print world. Here, I argue that the dropping costs of publication and distribution mean that effort and resource expended on preventing publication is wasted and that developing the tools and culture for post-publication annotation, curation and ranking is more productive. Rather than see this as information overload, or in Clay Shirky's words, a 'filter failure', I propose that it is more useful to see the problem as a 'discovery deficit'. This flood of content, instead of being a problem, is an opportunity to build technical and cultural frameworks that will enable us to extract more value from the outputs of research by exploiting the efficiencies that web-based systems can provide.