Brainstorm: Publishing Science in the Digital Era

“There’s been a rising swell of anger against certain scientific journals’ publishing practices in the research community. While I will not repost all the arguments here, one thing that keeps popping up is the realization that publishers are stuck in the print-age mindset. Over the last decade or so we’ve seen amazing advances in global communications via the internet and mobile devices. Publishers however appear weary to try anything new... If modern societies are now communicating in new and different ways through the internet and the publishers think that printing physical journals is still going to be critical  in the near future, those publishers are going to be left behind... So, here’s a few ideas of what could be if publishers decided to seriously pursue all the tools online publishing offers: [1] It’s almost a given nowadays that if you look at any article, blog, tweet, post, what-have-you, scroll down to the bottom and there will be the ability for you to leave a comment or ask a question about what you have just read. Why can’t there be something similar for scientific articles online?... The benefit here being that it is open. Anyone can see this communication... The other benefit is that even if the authors don’t respond to my question, someone else could still come by and say... [2] With data storage being ridiculously cheap and manuscripts freed from the confines of physical paper, publishers still only limit authors to a Supplemental Information paper... Give me a little tiny bit of web server space to share these extra files with interested colleagues... [3] The open notebook was an idea put forth a few years ago. The basic concept is that published papers only really disseminate knowledge about the minority of experiments that worked. There is a large volume of data and information about experiments that didn’t work but isn’t made available anywhere. This so-called “Dark Data” (ominous!) is extremely useful for other researchers...”