BE Board:Dinner Discussion/Alternate publishing models

Shortcomings of the current publishing model

1. Current publishing approach is very slow: results in yesterday's journal are 0.5-2 years old.
2. There is only one main level of information dissemination: peer-reviewed, highly polished summaries of work in journals.
   • There doesn’t seem to be a good reason to have only one form information distribution in science. While it is important to have tight, very trustworthy summaries of research it could also be useful to have “streaming results” from a lab updated weekly or monthly. Understandably, readers would need to take these results with more skepticism than those published that month in Nature; however, it doesn’t mean they would have no value.
3. Current publishing approaches do not encourage open feedback and reviews of work.
4. Published articles often do not contain sufficient information to reproduce the results of the work. For instance, compare a two paragraph Methods section to having access to a complete lab notebook.
5. Journals articles are edited and formatted for a print medium while being distributed primarily online. In other words, they fail to take advantage of the features offered by the web.
   • The near absence of hyperlinks in journal articles is the clearest example of this problem.
6. Published data is often not made available in a machine-understandable format.
   • Oftentimes the data from scientific research is not necessarily published in a form that encourages other groups to take the data and analyze it independently. Presenting work in a form that enables others to make use of it easily would enhance the quality of the work. Such goals are driving the scientific semantic web and SBML communities.
7. The whole idea of a "monthly Journal" as a means of aggregating information is outdated.
   • Who reads journals?? What was the last paper you didn't find via a pubmed or other search? What do we get out of collecting papers together based on their date of publication and loosely correlated to a broad subject area? The only journals I would read cover to cover are those that are devoted to a very specific topic (e.g. this month we will be having all papers on signaling networks) or top-tier tabloids (science/nature). It would be great if in issues specifically devoted to one topic they would actually re-publish old articles (imagine that!) that were relevant. Specific-topic issues at least make their effort in collecting articles in a monthly publication worth something.

Proposed alternatives

1. Review/Critique site
   • Would basically be a place to aggregate information about a paper. For instance, summaries, comments, even reviews potentially. Could layer this on top oif the current publishing system without much trouble, it can be a stand alone site - e.g. faculty of 1000 - but be for anyone.

Barriers to change

1. Current reward system only notices traditional publications.

References

1. Open Networks and Open Society: The Relationship between Freedom, Law, and Technology. Talk by Hal Abelson and John Wilbanks.
2. Science 2.0/Brainstorming