Bench Press

As Ben mentioned on Monday, we at Bench Press were disappointed that we were unable to attend the 2009 Science Online London Conference, but we were glad to see the amazing coverage within the blogosphere. One of the panels I was interested in was the first breakout session titled “What is a scientific paper?”. A discussion on the essence of scientific papers could be incredibly enlightening about steps needed to modernize scientific communication and publishing.

Having read through various notes and posts about the panel I have to agree with Cameron Neylon that while the panel’s discussion on methods to modernize papers themselves had some interesting ideas, a key issue with papers was glossed over; their continued publication in antiquated vessels known as journals. As Cameron Neylon writes:

The journal used to play an important role in publication. The publisher still has an important role but we need to step outside the notion of the journal and present different types of content and objects in the best way for that set of objects. The journal as brand may still have a role to play although I think that is increasingly going to be important only at the very top of the market. The idea of the journal is both constraining our thinking about how best to publish different types of research object and distorting the way we do and communicate science. Data publication should be optimized for access to and discoverability of data, software publication should make the software available and useable. Neither are particularly helped by putting “papers” in “journals”. They are helped by creating stable, appropriate publication mechanisms, with appropriate review mechanisms, making them citeable and making them valued. The point at which our response to needing to publish things stops being “well we’d better create a journal for that” then we might just have made it into the 21st century.

Cameron argues effectively that the journal, as used today, does little if anything to optimize access and discovery of data thereby constraining scientific communication and handicapping scientific progress.

While the panel may not have addressed this key issue thoroughly enough, I was happy to see that PLoS has taken a first step to address the limitations of the traditional journal with their new project PLoS Currents: Influenza. As described in their FAQ PLoS Currents: Influenza is

a website for immediate, open communication and discussion of new scientific data, analyses, and ideas in a critical research area. Submissions are screened by a group of leading researchers in the field, and those deemed appropriate are posted immediately and publicly archived at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). All content is open access, available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.

The explicit goal of this project is to provide easy and efficient access to data on Influenza, in hopes that scientific discussion and breakthroughs can be made in a more timely manner. While PLoS still differentiates Currents from Journals, their step out of the typical scientific publishing space with this project is commendable and looks like a great first step at expanding scientific publication. Hopefully this experiment works out and other publishers will begin to experiment as well.

For more coverage on PLoS Currents: Influenza, Bora Zivkovic has a great introductory post.