The Inevitable Asterisk*

UPDATE: Good discussions on this post on FriendFeed. See thread 1 and thread 2

I’ve been thinking recently about what STM publishers are here for now and in the future. What’s their purpose and what will they be doing by the time the next Olympics is over. According to many people we only function nowadays to perform peer review and to format the final paper into nice looking pdfs. What else do we do (I work for BioMed Central)? Archive papers, make them citeable. Some people might argue that that’s it.

So let’s imagine that that is all we do. What does it mean for the future of STM publishing if all that publishers do is perform peer review and make articles citeable and archive them, or at least make arrangements to make sure they are available in perpetuity. Or more specifically, what does it mean for the future of the journal? For it is the scientific journal which I feel can start counting its days as being numbered.

Peer review/citeability/archiving – none of this needs a journal. None of this even needs a traditional article.

Let’s flash forward 3 or 4 years.

Imagine yourself as a working research scientist. You’ve done some work which you think needs a wider audience. You write a blog post describing, in your own words and your own structure, what this advance is. You may even post images/data along with the narrative.

So far, so late-2009 huh?

Now imagine that instead of going to the time and effort of shoe-horning this blog post into the format of a journal article and submitting it to a journal you instead just leave the blog post as it is. No time wasted writing an article, waiting for peer reviewers and cross your fingers that it will be published.

No, because instead those 3 valuable services (peer review, citeability and archiving – the axis of STM publishing) are about to be performed on your blog post instead. They are going to be performed by your peers and you and your peers are going to get credit for all this work. This is how I see it working…

1. Colleagues and peers who are familar with your work and subscribe to your RSS feeds will notice your new post and read it.
2. They will then post a link to it on a central website (PubAx lets call it) alerting the wider world to it. They will get credit on that site for posting something and also for the number of times that link is clicked. It now has a DOI and is citeable in traditional literature.
3. He or she will comment on the article and rate it too. Not in depth comment as in a peer review, but the more lightweight comment you might find on your typical FriendFeed thread. In the future there will be so much stuff being ‘published’ that the luxury of in-depth peer review may well be something the author has to pay for.
4. Other people on the site can also rate and comment on it – they get credits on the site for this. All the time the original author is getting credits as well.
5. All work and comments are availble to all in an open way for 90 days – thereafter archived.
6. Libraries/universities subscribe to the service to access archives and other metrics based around this network of recommendations and commentary on non-traditionally published science.

I describe a blog posting here, but it could happen with video, audio, slides, datasets, software – anything.

Recommendation systems are going to be an essential part of the way we do science in the future. Not a luxury, nice-to-have, but an absolute necessity to keep on top of everything which is being published in a myriad of different channels. More journals are not a way to solve this.

Of course we already have a recommendation system which is held in high regard by its users in Faculty of 1000. What I’m decribing here is a ‘free’ (actually freemium) and open version of that – without subscription for the most recent content and without barriers to participation for its users. Also, it would cover all of science and all formats of research communication.

So who’s with me? Let’s start the revolution now.