The future of science publishing from 1996
Floating by in the Twitter stream, this from @leonidkruglyak. It leads to a light-hearted opinion(ated) piece by Sydney Brenner in Current Biology, 1996.
In 1996, you may recall, the Web was just a few years old. Amusingly (sadly?), it seems that Brenner predicted many of the topics in science publishing that we’re still discussing in 2013. It’s just that he thought they would be implemented in no time at all.
For example, open refereeing:
It is incidents such as this that have led me to question whether the anonymity of referees needs to be guarded so closely
Self-publishing/archiving and post-publication peer review:
The electronic pre-print with open discussion (not refereeing) will soon become commonplace; in fact, labs could go into the publication business by themselves
Demise of the journal impact factor, publishing economics and altmetrics:
We will need something to substitute for the present ratings given to papers appearing in ‘superior, peer-reviewed publications’ (and commercial publishers will find ways of making people pay for this)
Perhaps we should have a readership index; it should not be beyond the wit of man to devise a way of recording whenever a paper is read, hard-copied or cited
As Ethan said:
@neilfws what's taking so long?!— Ethan Perlstein (@eperlste) January 10, 2013
Filed under: publications Tagged: altmetrics, history, publishing, sydney brenner, www
Source: What You're Doing Is Rather Desperate - Category: Bioinformaticians Authors: nsaunders Tags: publications altmetrics history publishing sydney brenner www Source Type: blogs