Tipping over?

During this year, the scholarly publishing environment has felt like a rolling stone inexorably gathering speed as it goes downhill. The economic crisis seems to have added a rocket booster to the pace of change in the world of scholarly communication, and it absolutely feels like there is no going back now. Even areas of scholarly discourse that have been minimally affected so far are now seeing pressure to go digital and to change long-standing business models. What keeps coming to mind is – are we heading for a tipping point, the place where the momentum for change becomes unstoppable, and if so what lies beyond it? As described by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,1 ideas, products, messages, and behaviors all spread in the same way viruses do. He compares their spread to that of a viral epidemic – not a linear dissemination but rather an exponential one, which can be dramatic when change reaches ‘the tipping point, the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point’ (p. 12). Gladwell cites three important factors that contribute to an idea reaching the tipping point: