It's like someone would force you to ride a horse to work, instead of driving a car. But let us start at the beginning.
One of the most important aspects of being a scientist is to tell the world about your scientific discoveries. The traditional way for any scientist to disseminate their work is to publish a scientific paper in one of the scientific journals. This is a very ineffective way to share such information and if you don't believe me, ask any scientist if they enjoy reading a 20 page pdf written in "scientific English" and trying to deconvolute what were the authors doing.
If you had to go through the process of publishing a scientific paper, I am sure you found many things that should be improved. Here are some of the flaws of the current scientific dissemination system.
Every journal has different rules how the papers should be submitted. It usually takes a long time to get the responses from peers and in most cases you have to guarantee that you are not submitting this paper to any other journal at that point. If your paper doesn't get accepted, you have to start the process all over again. This means find another journal and change the paper according to their rules.
When you submit a paper to a journal, it is examined by the editor, who then chooses peers that will review your paper. If your work is done in a very niche field, the reviewers very likely know you and you present a competitor. By reviewing the paper they get a heads-up about your research and reasoning as well as have the power to sabotage your paper in worst case. Since the communication between you and the peers is restricted to only one way comments in writing, you are often forced to yield to the comments of the peer in order to get the paper published, even if you don't necessarily agree with them.
As one of the most important measures of your scientific findings is the Impact Factor (IF) of the journal where you publish your paper. The more cited an average scientific contribution is in a specific journal, the higher the IF it has. This drastically devalues the research done in niche areas, where you might have a revolutionary breakthrough, but it concerns a smaller audience, than some minor discovery in e.g. cancer research. Adding to this many national and international grant givers consider the IF of your recent papers as one of the most important metric to determine whether you should receive a grant or not.
Negative results is not something the journals like to publish, since it does not generate much citation. Therefore scientists are incentivised to make over-the-top claims and dramatic conclusions, often leaving out important facts about the discoveries they have made on their way that would be important to others, but cannot be interpreted as "amazing". This problem has been also addressed by previous Splice article “Publish or Perish” – Why Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research.
All these flaws of the current system are making us forget one particular and arguably the most important issue: distributing the novelties in cutting edge science via PDFs is extremely inefficient!
It is quite remarkable that in this day and age, where everything has to be touch-friendly, responsive, interactive, mobile and so on, we rely on PDFs to distribute science. Most journals do not even support colour in the printed PDF which results in very poor visuals, making boring graphs and tables being the most common way to display results. Also the structure of a scientific journal is very rigid (introduction, methods, results, discussion) and is not suitable for all the different research areas and approaches to doing science. Last but not least the increasing amount of raw data (measurements, images, etc.) cannot be presented in a PDF and has to be uploaded separately if at all. This leaves you, the reader, to download the data and to recreate the data analysis the authors described, which is often (deliberately) impossible.
Well, let us ask ourselves what we actually do, when we want to inform ourselves about a particular every-day event. For example, which smart phone should I buy? The first thing you do is find a web page that clearly describes the benefits of a particular product, interactive experience (e.g. embedded videos, images and responsive design) and has clear, concise messages.
Why shouldn't be the same for science? Why isn't there a "web page" of a scientific publication instead of the PDF, where one could browse the results interactively, change the axes on the graphs, and select columns to see in the table? What about connecting these results with images, video and even 3D video? Imagine exploring a 3D structure of a protein wearing 3D glasses instead of reading about it in a scientific paper.
You might think that peer review is the reason why we should keep the current system. Wrong. In an excellent experiment in which the author has submitted 304 versions of the wonder drug paper to open-access journals, more than half of the journals accepted the paper, failing to notice its fatal flaws. The results of the experiment that were published in Science clearly overrules the fact that peer review is a reason why we should stick to completely unintuitive sharing of scientific data.
It is my personal belief that the system is about to change soon. We will witness a much more interactive science, where people collaborate and build upon other work, not as individual publications, but rather as a continuous contribution to knowledge and understanding of the world around us. The scientific journals as organization will become a thing of the past and the science will become post-peer reviewed, as it has been before. Do your research, make it available for others to read and leave it to the public scrutiny. If it survives the critics, it's a good piece of science.
This is already possible. But as they say “old habits die hard”. It will take a technological break-through, driven by scientists, to change the current system that is widely accepted by the academia. Something like Uber was for a Taxi industry or Air B&B was for the accommodation industry.
sciNote shares that vision as an open source and free platform where scientists can organize their research data and share it with others. And many more such platforms will follow.
Klemen Zupancic, PhD
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