Speeding up scholarly communication for rapid sharing | Times Higher Education

"William Mobley, a neuroscientist from the University of California, San Diego, is urging academic publishers to start offering authors the option to publish short units of communication, which he calls 'single figure publications' (SFPs) in an editorial published in F1000Research. The idea behind SFPs is to speed up scholarly communication, and make it more efficient by encouraging researchers to submit shorter publications with a particular focus on data, instead of waiting to publish them as part of larger research papers. The editorial calls for an 'optimal format' of scholarly communication to ensure the findings presented are valid with full declaration of all materials and methods, rapidly shared with minimal delays, machine-readable and free of bias. These micro-publications would, the editorial proposes, consist of a figure, a legend, material and methods, and an optional results section ... Publishing nimble units of data, known as nano-publications, has become common in recent years; there are now whole repositories and journals, such as Scientific Data, dedicated to publishing data. But, according to the editorial, SFPs aim to build an 'important bridge' between traditional journal papers and data nano-publications.  SFPs could be used to publish confirmatory data, negative results, data refuting published results and analysis of manufacturer-made reagents or materials, explains Professor Mobley. 'People need to know when something doesn’t work the way others have proposed that it works.' This would also help to measure reproducibility of papers, he adds ..."