Saturday, June 21, 2008

The future of scientific article

"scientific paper of the future will be a work in progress — with different people with different skills and talents contributing to a body of work sequentially: one has the idea, another turns it into a hypothesis, another designs the experiments, another runs them, another analyzes the data, another visualizes them, another interprets them, another places several such pieces of work together into a historical and philosophical context and finishes writing the "paper". The bits and pieces of it are independently searchable and citable and they are all interconnected by links until the final version is put all together in one place. After all, science as the work of a lonely genius is pretty much a myth — it has been, for the most part, a very collective endeavor. The readers of the paper then keep adding their commentary, links to subsequent "papers," blog posts, media articles, etc. The unity of the paper — a single date, journal, volume, issue, page —
will be gone. All of science will become interdisciplinary and interconnected. "

Bora Zivlokic Online Community Manager for PLoS ONE , Journal of Science Communication

No comments: