

Proposal: consider scientific research papers like open source software - elehack
http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2011/02/11/taking-scientific-publishing-to-the-next-level/

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jessriedel
Nothing wrong with the idea per se. But, as usual, no explanation for how the
incentives and cultural changes needed to induce people would be implemented.
Sorry, but no one is going to reward a grad student, career-wise, for
rewriting other scientist's papers and catching bugs. Heck, the only reason
scientists proofread their stuff _at all_ is to avoid embarrassment. If there
were an army of students eager to fix your mistakes, scientists would be even
_less_ careful.

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Cushman
I think the subtext here is that academic culture should become more like OSS
culture, where your reputation is built on the content of your commits rather
than just having your name on a project somewhere.

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nocipher
I fail to see how it changes things in a fundamental way. Having your name on
a paper is supposed to mean that you contributed to the results of that paper.
This is how you build up your reputation: you publish lots of relevant
results.

This is only possible if you continue to work and publish, which in turn makes
you a more sought after partner for collaboration. In the same vein, if your
contributions are consistently minimal, then you will be less sought after
which will lower your frequency of publication. In essence, the current system
already correlates rewards with the quality of one's contributions.

Thus, the proposed changes do not affect how one garners reputation. Instead,
I think the subtext is that the current body of research papers could be
significantly improved, but isn't because there is no system in place to
revise them in a distributed manner.

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impendia
Along related lines, Tim Gowers (a Fields medalist in mathematics) has started
the Polymath Project, which has produced several excellent, massively
collaborative, research papers in math.

<http://polymathprojects.org/>

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_corbett
as a researcher I am completely on board with this idea-but to work it has to
be built into the culture, the grants, and the way hiring is done. even
demanding code be open source is an uphill battle, no major grants in my field
provide any money for support, maintenance, hosting etc. or demand code be
open-sourced for funding.

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evgenit
This is a wonderful idea, particularly since even a partial implementation
would do good. Just having a license for derivative works and the latex source
would do wonders.

A typical situation is that you notice an obvious extension to a result in a
paper, which does not warrant publication. Being able to make an updated
version of a paper with that easily would be a good thing.

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zipdog
I can't even access half the published papers I want to read, so I suspect the
scientific community will need to solve that problem (ie how to throttle the
publishers) before any thought of allowing versioning and revisions to papers.

As well, how would references work? Citations would have to reference a
specific version of every paper, which could potentially create a huge mess.

But I totally agree that change needs to come to the way scientific papers are
published and accessed, and this is one of the better ideas I've seen out
there.

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rubidium
>We spend much time perfecting irrelevant papers to get them through peer
review.

Maybe stop publishing irrelevant papers? Admitted, academia has serious
problems. The solution isn't open source though.

Building a collaborative framework around research would be great, but
solidarity and small group research will continue to be the primary drivers of
innovative research.

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jorleif
Academics can't stop publishing irrelevant papers, since funding is granted
based on publication history. To get really novel things done researchers must
keep a steady stream of publications. This is easiest achieved by making
somewhat easy, incremental research to a large part. This incentive, or even
rather selection, problem is, I think the core reason for this ancient
publishing model.

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pixcavator
Good idea but why make thing so complicated? Research papers isn’t code --
they don’t have to "compile". Just write what you want in your blog/site/etc
and link. If you want it all in one place, set up a wiki.

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brainid
I know of one existing journal that is pretty close to this, the insight
journal: <http://www.insight-journal.org/>

