{"id":271,"date":"2007-09-10T04:00:43","date_gmt":"2007-09-10T08:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/?p=271"},"modified":"2007-09-10T04:00:53","modified_gmt":"2007-09-10T08:00:53","slug":"scientific-communication","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/scientific-communication\/","title":{"rendered":"Reinventing scientific papers"},"content":{"rendered":"

By guest blogger Robin Blume-Kohout<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2005, Slate<\/a> published twelve essays on “How to reinvent higher education”<\/a>. The opening paragraphs of one<\/a>, by Alison Gopnik<\/a>, still burn in my mind:<\/p>\n

I’m a cognitive scientist who is also a university professor. There is a staggering contrast between what I know about learning from the lab and the way I teach in the classroom. … I know that children, and even adults, learn about the everyday world around them in much the way that scientists learn. …Almost none of this happens in the average university classroom, including mine. In lecture classes, the teacher talks and the students write down what the teacher says. In seminars, the students write down what other students say. This is, literally, a medieval form of learning<\/span>…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In short, we are screwing up — and we should know better.<\/p>\n

Scientific publishing — the primary means by which we communicate with other scientists — is in the same boat:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. We’re doing it badly,<\/li>\n
  2. Our methods are medieval,<\/li>\n
  3. We should know better.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Technically, point #2 is unfair. Scientific publishing dates from the 1660s, when Proceedings of the Royal Society emerged from Henry Oldenburg<\/a>‘s voluminous scientific correspondence. If you wanted to show off your research in 1665, you wrote a letter to Henry. When he got it (a month or two later), he forwarded it to someone who could tell him whether it was any good. If the referee liked it, then (after a few more month-long postal delays), Henry read your letter out loud to the Royal Society, and it got recorded in the Proceedings.
    \n<\/a>
    \nThese days, it’s quite different. Specifically:<\/p>\n

      \n
    1. We write letters in LaTeX, and email them,<\/li>\n
    2. There are so many journals that nobody reads most of them,<\/li>\n
    3. Henry doesn’t read your letter out loud.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      The rest of the system is unchanged. This raises a bunch of questions, like “Why does publication take 6 months<\/span>?”, “Why is it so expensive<\/span>?”, and “Does anybody read journals, what with the<\/span> arXiv<\/a>?” I’m not going to discuss these questions, but if you’re interested, you might try the Wikipedia<\/a> article on scientific journals<\/a>. Which is a perfect example of why we should know better<\/span>.<\/p>\n

      I’m not talking about the content. I’m talking about the article itself, and how I referenced it — with a hyperlink. I’ve given you incredible power. Quickly and easily, you can:<\/p>\n