A Vision for the Future of Scholarly Publishing

“In many ways, the Research Works Act has been a blessing (see excellent link round up here). It has taken the moderately complacent but always grousing scientific community and whipped our feelings about the current state and cost of scientific publishing into a white hot fury... And I think we’re all coming to the conclusion that a PLoS-like model is a great way to go. Science must end up in an open access repository at the end of the day... So I’ve been dreaming. A vision of the future of scientific publishing. What if arXiv, reedit, PLoS, pubcreds, slashdot’s commenting system, figshare, Data One, and Web 2.0 had a baby? This lead to an idea – a concept – a proposal. So, here’s my vision of the future. It’s not the only vision, and there is substantial room for discussion, but, it’s a start… Consider this a SciFi musing on scholarly publishing. I sit down with my morning cup of coffee and log into SciX. I am presented with several options on the main screen: [1] Read Papers [2] Submit a Paper [3] Revise a Paper [4] Review the Reviewers... So, what happens when I click on each of those? Let’s follow each one, one by one...”