Researchers Have the Power to Change Publication Incentives. Nobody Else.

ab1630's bookmarks 2018-04-18

Summary:

"In an excellent new feature for the Atlantic, James Somers convincingly argues that the scientific paper is obsolete. Reinforcing arguments made by many others, including myself, Somers points out that a PDF is an amazingly antiquated means of communicating scientific knowledge in the 21st century. Mimicking the output of a printing press, in an age of software code and big data, is anachronistic to say the very least.

In addition to arguing that the process of representing science should be just as dynamic as the work of doing science, Somers presents two alternative visions of what the future state of scientific publishing could look like. One option for publishing would be the walled garden, proprietary software approach — as represented by the program Wolfram Mathematica. The other is a completely open source approach, with no centralized direction— as represented by Project Jupyter. Somers shows that, so far, Project Jupyter has achieved more penetration into the everyday working lives of researchers. I hope this continues. All of science — indeed, all of scholarship — rests on sharing knowledge and building upon what has come before. Doing so within the bounds of a proprietary format is antithetical to that mission.

Thinking about these alternative futures is getting very far ahead of ourselves, though. At the moment the traditional paper (or PDF) remains the coin of the realm for sharing new scholarly knowledge. This may seem ridiculous, because it is, but Somers points out that it often takes decades for new communication technologies to take hold: “After Gutenberg, the printing press was mostly used to mimic the calligraphy in bibles. It took nearly 100 years of technical and conceptual improvements to invent the modern book.” (Bold mine). Given that the internet has been in common use for a mere quarter-century, we may have a long way to go before scholarly publishing fully embraces the capabilities of the web...."

Link:

https://medium.com/@marcusbanks/researchers-have-the-power-to-change-publication-incentives-nobody-else-212ca0647846

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » ab1630's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.new oa.publishing oa.authors oa.scholcomm oa.formats oa.speed oa.trends oa.partial oa.incentives oa.mandates oa.gold oa.policies.journals oa.data oa.preprints oa.green oa.recommendations oa.repositories oa.versions oa.policies oa.journals

Date tagged:

04/18/2018, 16:43

Date published:

04/18/2018, 12:44