Microsoft Rolls Out Publishing and Research Tools for Academics - Chronicle.com
With this announcement I can see the bright future of scholarly MS Publishing now: an academic fires up Word 2010 to write their new article (using MS NewVista as the required OS); collaborates with co-authors across the globe (who must also use Word 2010 to participate); loads it into the remote Microsoft Repository (proprietary and accessible only via Word); other scholars use nice tools to comment on the work (as long as they are using Internet Explorer 10); life unfolds in the new universe and all are happy. Do we really want to embrace anther decade of open-but-closed-without-our-tools suite of Microsoft products just when open access and open source are leading us out of that vendor quagmire? I hope not. As much as Microsoft's considerable research efforts are appreciated in the research landscape, I shudder to think where this will take us, promises of free and openness and all. See Peter Suber's post for an alternate view.
It makes you nervous for the same reason it makes me nervous: because MS has a long history of finding new ways to lock in customers, and this is another of those examples. Any institution that buys into this "free" system would be insane. As an academic author, I certainly won't be a part of it.
So what would be the alternative, people might wonder? Look to open solutions that don't insist on particular authoring tools (say Word) or server backends (Sharepoint, etc.). I'd expect efforts like Zotero to point towards what that might look like.
Posted by: Bruce D'Arcus | August 12, 2008 at 07:12 PM