
Scholarly Publishing and its Discontents - shurtler
http://www.joshuagans.com/scholarly-publishing-and-its-discontents/
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shurtler
Central proposal on p. 98: "What if, instead, knowledge was unbundled from the
start and embedded in how researchers actually develop their knowledge? This
is essentially what happens with computer code , where programmers are
encouraged to use GitHub for their own repository and versioning processes.
Imagine that instead of code, it was the experiments, observations,
calculations, and so on, that researchers stored. They could then release
those units for “forking” and development by others — all with attribution and
updating built in. From that base, they could then write their journal
articles linking straight back to the primordial elements of their own and
others’ research. It is easy at a high level to think about how knowledge
could be unbundled, but once a framework is developed, then graduate students
who were learning and reading past knowledge would be encouraged to translate
their own information into the new framework. The knowledge could be freed
from the bounds of journals without undermining all the curation and
attribution work that goes with them. And at the same time, a searchable
database that is open by design would exist not for articles, pages, or PDFs,
but for the knowledge itself."

