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GLOBAL Letting scientific publishing as we know it perish Tweet



The reader might reply by addressing everything the first writer brought up and introduce new topics. Letters between especially brilliant people became books and, in the scientific world, academic societies began compiling letters from scientists into journals.



Back then, if one of your favourite pen pals started writing shorter and shorter letters, each covering less ground, you might have worried that something was wrong with your friend – or your friendship.



Of course, since then, we've all learned to get to the point. Instead of treatises, we send texts. Instead of missives, we send emoticons.



That may be okay, as long as people still feel that their communications count. But in the world of science, communication has undergone a troubling transformation.



Scientists have discovered that few people really read their papers and fewer still outside their immediate family or research specialty. Instead, when it’s time for a committee to review a scientist’s progress, they often just tally up how many publications the scientist has in top journals.



It’s an understandable shortcut, but it devalues the meaning of each publication and distorts our body of knowledge. Instead of focusing on a few meatier papers, scientists break down their work into shorter papers. And they pack in the emotions.



"Exciting, novel results are more publishable than other kinds," University of Virginia psychologist and replicability researcher Brian Nosek



But novel results may not be the same as the best work. In fact, the most exciting results are often the hardest to replicate, perhaps because they were far from the statistical mean to begin with.



And, because the academic world tends to reward publishing the first answer more than publishing the right answer,



False starts and funding



Researchers generally agree that making real discoveries can take years and years and involve false starts. Telling that story to your colleagues can take lots of time and space. If you can only do it after the fact, it may be too late to win the research grant you need to complete your work. It's also risky: what if doubts about one part of your magnum opus lead reviewers to reject the whole thing?



One answer is the so-called minimum publishable unit. That is, break up your work and publish it one nugget at a time. In fact, specialised outlets are popping up to enable this sort of communication (



That leads to shortcuts of all kinds, including



What if we could figure out better incentives for more diverse publishing formats? What if we could reward researchers who stepped back, thought about their work some more and published more meaningful analyses? Or what if publishing a database that took years of work to build and clean earned the same reward as a controversial but highly citable take on some strange nugget in someone else’s dataset?



Decentralising publishing



We're optimistic that everyone from Nobel Prize-winning scientists to stealth-mode start-ups is ready to revolutionise scientific publishing. In fact, some have already begun using the blockchain to start decentralising publishing. Blockchain is a growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked using cryptography. Publicly readable blockchains are widely used by cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. We recommend checking the



Our own contribution,



And instead of paying publishers once to publish an article and a second time to read it, scientists can actually collect tokens from Project Aiur as an incentive for participating. The tokens are exchangeable for artificial intelligence-aided literature searches.



In this hypothetical new world, researchers can use their contributions to validating knowledge generated by other people to generate their own new knowledge. We think it's a powerful idea. Are you ready to validate it?



Anita Schjøll Brede is CEO of Iris.ai.

Remember when we used to send letters? Or, for younger readers, emails? There was a time when those letters or emails included complex reflections on what was happening in your life and thought-provoking discussions for your reader to consider.The reader might reply by addressing everything the first writer brought up and introduce new topics. Letters between especially brilliant people became books and, in the scientific world, academic societies began compiling letters from scientists into journals.Back then, if one of your favourite pen pals started writing shorter and shorter letters, each covering less ground, you might have worried that something was wrong with your friend – or your friendship.Of course, since then, we've all learned to get to the point. Instead of treatises, we send texts. Instead of missives, we send emoticons.That may be okay, as long as people still feel that their communications count. But in the world of science, communication has undergone a troubling transformation.Scientists have discovered that few people really read their papers and fewer still outside their immediate family or research specialty. Instead, when it’s time for a committee to review a scientist’s progress, they often just tally up how many publications the scientist has in top journals.It’s an understandable shortcut, but it devalues the meaning of each publication and distorts our body of knowledge. Instead of focusing on a few meatier papers, scientists break down their work into shorter papers. And they pack in the emotions."Exciting, novel results are more publishable than other kinds," University of Virginia psychologist and replicability researcher Brian Nosek told Vox But novel results may not be the same as the best work. In fact, the most exciting results are often the hardest to replicate, perhaps because they were far from the statistical mean to begin with.And, because the academic world tends to reward publishing the first answer more than publishing the right answer, there probably isn’t enough replication . Do we really want the scientific record to consist mostly of the unexplained outliers?Researchers generally agree that making real discoveries can take years and years and involve false starts. Telling that story to your colleagues can take lots of time and space. If you can only do it after the fact, it may be too late to win the research grant you need to complete your work. It's also risky: what if doubts about one part of your magnum opus lead reviewers to reject the whole thing?One answer is the so-called minimum publishable unit. That is, break up your work and publish it one nugget at a time. In fact, specialised outlets are popping up to enable this sort of communication ( Nanopub.org ). In principle, it lets researchers collect citations and credit as they go. And it lets grant committees (and hiring committees) evaluate candidates. In practice, it means we may be choosing quantity over quality.That leads to shortcuts of all kinds, including outright fraud in the peer-review process since researchers know that they’ll be evaluated by how many papers they’ve published instead of what the papers say. Some researchers and journals have even resorted to forming cartels to improve their citations. This distorts the scientific record, burying the most innovative research beneath work done by more inventive crooked scientists.What if we could figure out better incentives for more diverse publishing formats? What if we could reward researchers who stepped back, thought about their work some more and published more meaningful analyses? Or what if publishing a database that took years of work to build and clean earned the same reward as a controversial but highly citable take on some strange nugget in someone else’s dataset?We're optimistic that everyone from Nobel Prize-winning scientists to stealth-mode start-ups is ready to revolutionise scientific publishing. In fact, some have already begun using the blockchain to start decentralising publishing. Blockchain is a growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked using cryptography. Publicly readable blockchains are widely used by cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. We recommend checking the Blockchain for Science initiative for an updated list.Our own contribution, Project Aiur , is a more transparent, secure publishing community for researchers around the world. By using the security of the blockchain, scientists can validate one another's contributions to the peer-review system.And instead of paying publishers once to publish an article and a second time to read it, scientists can actually collect tokens from Project Aiur as an incentive for participating. The tokens are exchangeable for artificial intelligence-aided literature searches.In this hypothetical new world, researchers can use their contributions to validating knowledge generated by other people to generate their own new knowledge. We think it's a powerful idea. Are you ready to validate it? Follow University World News on Facebook



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