I suppose the title says it all?
Actually probably not so I’ll attempt to explain what I mean. The fundamental concept is actually very simple: The faster knowledge is accessible to researchers the quicker more research can be done, thus accelerating scientific advancement. Sort of similar to a snowball affect. Makes sense right?
Believe it or not this is actually a new concept in the field of information science. At least new in the fact that someone has decided to promote it and actually try to put it into practice. There could be several reasons for this that range from lethargy to technological limitations. I prefer the latter and that is where I’m putting all my eggs, though my mother strictly warned me against such practices. Well Mom, there all there, sorry.Never in the history of human ingenuity and scientific development has information been so easy to share. We can think Al Gore and his internet for that. I’m not going to go into the details on this revelation as I am assuming most people reading this have a clue about the WWW and it’s impact on communication and thus knowledge sharing. More on that in a minute.
But it goes beyond capability, there must be by desire to share. Historically researchers have been anxious about all out sharing there findings and strategies, except in situations where they are getting the credit for it and, ultimately, ground for tenure. This seems very ironic and counterproductive to me and apparently to the new generation of scientists. With all the problems and issues currently facing our planet such as global warming, petroleum distribution, fossil fuel consumption and war, just to name a few, there seems to be a much bigger push for sharing. Personally I think that is the way the scientific community should work and will be better for it.
The information science field seems to also be sitting up and taking notice. There is a lot of focus, particularly in the US Government, on what is being termed federating searching and the ‘Deep Web‘. These technologies and concepts, when used and implemented to their potential, will define the title concept. A few examples of these ‘new’ engines can be seen at Science.gov and Science Accelerator. From these sites you might actually see some of my handiwork (/wink).
Other industries and entities also seem to be taking notice. Check out this article by the O’reilly group about the innovations over at Nature Precedings.
All I can say is Go, Go Science!
Ramblings 
Nature Precedings needs to have a good rating system for open, community-based review to work well. Currently, submitted articles can be voted for, but that does not tell one how many would have voted against it. Nor does one get to know the negative points unless they go through the whole article themselves. Such negative points may have been mentioned in some comments but they are not easy to spot. Further, one is usually disinclined to write textual comments unless one has a strong interest to do so.
With open preprint systems, being able to find useful and reliable ideas and data in articles is perhaps more important than being able to submit one. This becomes apparent as the number of articles increase, when searching can return hundreds and thousands of articles. One canￂﾒt go through all of them, and a few ￂﾑbadￂﾒ articles can easily cause frustration and distrust in the quality of the submissions.
But if search criteria can include objective measures of article quality, then one can indeed easily find valuable material. Nature Precedings should therefore opt for a point-based rating system where different aspects of articles can be appraised.
Thus, instead of just letting one vote for an article, one should be allowed to rate its different aspects on, say, a 1-5 scale. Such aspects can include:
1. clarity
2. originality
3. novelty
4. presence and quality of experimental data
5. logical procession
6. depth
7. proper referencing
In effect, this would be a proper peer-review system.
The ratings, both their average and their spread, should be displayed alongside articles.
A good review/rating system will discourage submission of bad articles, build trust in the usability and reliability of content in Nature Precedings, and encourage quality submissions.
(similar comments posted elsewhere on the web by me)
Comment by Santosh Patnaik — June 22, 2007 @ 7:43 pm |
Interesting.
Comment by Lee — December 15, 2008 @ 7:43 pm |