Is the Open Science Revolution For Real? | Wired Science | Wired.com

“The researcher rebellion against the closed research-and-publishing system, tallied most explicitly in a petition boycotting publisher Elsevier, continues to expand. (The Economist covers it here, and I covered the complaints last year in a feature.) The big question, of course, is whether this noisy riot will engender something like a real revolution. Will it replace the old regime with a new?... That will be depend on many things, but a key will be the construction of a replacement model for the traditional academic publishing system that so frustrates .  As studious rebels know, a key part of a successful revolution is building an alternate set of institutions and services  — an alternate infrastructure — to offer people as and after you topple the regime... To replace the traditional publishing system, they need to provide alternatives to its main functions. Those functions, as I described in my feature Free Science, One Paper at a Time, are: [1] Editing  & review –  making sure a paper is logical and intelligible; also assessing its value and significance. Review has traditionally been formal peer review... [2] publication/distribution — getting the thing out there where people can read it [3] credit/reputation — ensuring that the author or authors get credit for the work [4]archiving – making the work available to future researchers. In the current system, the journal system bundles all these functions into the paper... What are the rebels offering to replace that system? By casting around the last couple days, I’ve assembled a list of tools created by the open-science community that seek to replace or amend the various parts of the conventional journal system... together they show that the rebels (to indulge my metaphor) have gone a long way to creating the alternate infrastructure... Add that all up, the revolt is looking pretty good. Does this mean they’ll swarm right over the ramparts? Hard to say... But the pressure to change keeps building and is unlikely to stop. Some of the biggest targets are showing signs of the sort of inflexibility that mark the titan ready to fall. One source this week told me, for instance, that in the halls of one major scientific publishing concern, the senior leadership are mystified and the younger middle ranks terrified: a telling combination...”