Scholarly Publishing and its Discontents

http://www.joshuagans.com/scholarly-publishing-and-its-discontents/

by shurtler • 9 years ago

1 1 9 years ago

shurtler• 9 years ago

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."

Scholarly Publishing and its Discontents

Related Stories