Related to Ryan Eby’s recent post about PLoS One, last month’s Wired had an excellent article about open-access publishing and Harold Varmus. Also in that issue is an article on harnessing the power of crowds for distributed computation. It mentions things like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
What’s missing is tying the two together. With open-access publishing and the proper distributed framework we could have a new model of democratic publishing. Nature is discussing some of this in their Peer Review Debate.
Opening up the peer-review process doesn’t necessarily dilute the quality of science published. With a proper reputation or trust system we could still meets scholary standards. A reputation system could even give papers a rating depending on who reviewed them. If the article was reviewed by experts in a field, it could have a high rating. If it was reviewed by web nobodies, it could have a low rating. Browsing systems could be setup to browse by this trust metric.
Ahhh, so the problem here is that history is littered with major scientific advances that were humbly considered a pile of crap when they were published. Still — they were published. Archimedes, Newton, Einstein, more recently the early papers from Hawking….how does such a system account for revolutionary ideas?
The system doesn’t make finding revolutionary ideas impossible. Those papers and ideas will still be out there, but they may not be ranked highly by the orthodox scientific community.
In fact, a public peer review system might make such ideas easier to find.
Suppose I’m a researcher in a field. I’d like to keep up on the latest advances, especially ones other major researchers in the field are investigating. So I subscribe to several “experts” feeds, and scan those papers they approve of. But I might also have one or two researchers on the fringe who I subscribe to or get recommendations from.
This ensures I still get fresh material that may have just been overlooked. Other possibilities include a random article a day. Or maybe showing articles that have high activity, etc.
Hmmm, I see. I thought at first some papers wouldn’t be published, but I think what you’re saying is that there would be more of a slashdot-type interface, where you filter out papers (responses) below a certain rating (threshold). An interesting idea…..what you’d need, of course, is the critical mass of reasearchers in a given field to get it started. For the hard sciences, I think the best present example of this phenomenon is PLoS, but even that isn’t all that good.
One last problem: How do you break the grip of the current publishers? You could try playing up the IP issues (most science journals require you to sign over all rights to an article they publish — it becomes their property), but that hasn’t seemed to work well (enough) with PLoS to get it going significantly….
How is PLoS not doing well? With an impact factor of 14.672, PLoS Biology seems to be doing decently.
So journals that have more author friendly copyright is one part of breaking the grip. The second is realizing that libraries are doing as much damage as they are good. I continually hear arguments against using wonderful resources such as Citeseer and Google Scholar because “We’re already paying so much for our indexes..” We need to provide alternatives to traditional libraries that are truly patron and user friendly.
Ahhh, I stand corrected. I never found a 2005 ISI listing — they (ISI) try to block free postings of it since you have to pay to get it from them, at least as far as I can tell. Last I checked, the IF was around 8.0; okay, but certainly not great. 14 is much better, and gives me some hope.
I think it’s truly unfortunate (read: criminally incompetent) that librarians won’t use free services like Google Scholar. I use it almost as regularly as PubMed — another fantastic free search — but I guess the new is scary to some libraries. So the second challenge is this, then: How do we get libraries to accept and welcome beneficial changes, or at least multiple methods for reaching the same result? I love the library (I know, I’m wierd) and don’t want to see it disappear because a low-cost alternative springs up and they can’t adapt (see: Airlines, Major). *sigh* So many problems, so little time.