The following is my contribution to a collection prepared by the British Library and released today at the Wellcome Trust, called “Driving UK Research. Is copyright a help or a hindrance?” which is being released under a CC-BY-NC license. The British Library kindly allowed authors to retain copyright on their contributions so I am here releasing the text into the public domain via a CCZero waiver.

The idea that “it’s not information overload, it’s filter failure” combined with the traditional process of filtering scholarly communication by peer review prior to publication seems to be leading towards the idea that we need to build better filters by beefing up the curation of research output before it is published. Here I argue that this is backwards and that the ‘filter failure’ soundbite is maybe unfortunate in the context of scholarly communications. The web won’t reduce the cost of curation, but it has reduced the cost of publication. This means that instead of building filters to prevent stuff getting on the web it is more productive to focus on enhancing discovery. A focus on enabling discovery can both deliver for researchers and provide business models that are more aligned with the way the web works.