Meet Octopus, a new vision for scientific publishing | Science | AAAS

"The solution, as [Alexandra Freeman] sees it, is a new publishing system that puts less emphasis on papers that tell sexy, full-length “stories.” To that end, earlier this week Freeman—now the executive director of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom—presented her vision for a modular, collaborative, open publishing platform at a pitch competition for ideas to improve research culture run by the U.K. Royal Society....

"Fundamentally, I believe that the whole concept of the scientific paper drives people to tell stories rather than worry about the quality of the actual research. It’s true that during the scientific process, you usually start with a problem and you finish with a real-world use of your solutions. But the whole chain, from one end to the other, takes a whole range of different skills and different people and different amounts of time. Forcing researchers to guard their work and get to the end of the chain before they can publish anything makes people work in silos, when we’d all be much better off if everybody shared their work as they went along and everybody collaborated to get to the end of the process." ..."