Alberto_Pepe
Co-Founder | Authorea

The ever-increasing scale and size of knowledge output is something we need to deal with no matter what, I think. I believe it goes beyond scientific publishing - the same has happened to all domains of knowledge creation, including fiction (self-publishing eBooks), film, photo, and audio (eg. Youtube), news (social media as blogs and twitter). As the barriers of entry to publishing become ever lower, we have to find new ways of organizing and recognizing valuable information.
It is no accident that the early players who managed to organize the free dissemination of information on planetary scale are now some of the highest valued companies in the world. As science becomes more data-driven and computational in nature, scientific work, and hence literature, methods and datasets (as well as collaborations!) will keep increasing both in frequency and size.

In my opinion, we shouldn't fear this acceleration of the process of human discovery, and we shouldn't see it as an overwhelming development. Rather, we should be humbled by the progress we are able to make and become ever better at summarizing and organizing the growing size of the body of scientific knowledge. There are entire disciplines dedicated to studying these challenges - Knowledge Management, Information Theory and Retrieval, Data Science, Information Seeking Behavior, and so on (the field of Information Science, broadly). A promising new ecosystem of tools and initiatives is emerging, with the aim to build information solutions for scientific management. I am happy that Authorea is part of that ecosystem.