The future of scientific publishing?

At the Scienceblogging conference, my favorite session was one on open science and publishing, led by Hemai Parathasarthy. Much of the discussion focused on the current publishing model and how it is evolving, what works and what doesn’t. Some of the discussion centered around why people published in journals like Nature and Science. Another thread centered around reusing content, especially the Creative Commons kind found in PLoS journals and others.

From those threads and others, I made the comment that perhaps the future of publishing lies in a world where the role of Nature and Science and their abilities in managing reviewers and editorial staff becomes one of providing opinion and commentary on the best science. In essence they become the gatekeepers of science; Hemai likened it to the Faculty of 1000. Since the publications would be CC licensed, the content could be re-published with commentary either as a separate column, or added as annotation to the original publication. My preference is to the former, with the paper following immediately, with extensive hyperlinking from the opinion and commentary to the paper.

I’d like to expand on that thought. Imagine a world where each paper gets a DOI and each DOI can be represented by a unique URI, which is just an extension of what people are doing today. In essence, any web search for scientific material should index that DOI URI. Anything discussing that page (blog post, news article, etc) should get indexed along with it, making it possible to build aggregators around the DOI. Quite franky, I can’t quite figure out the exact model that would work. While I do like the PLoS One approach a lot, people should be free to publish when they want, how they want, where they want, with the authors retaining ownership of the content. The process would be streamlined by the web, and the wisdom of crowds would take care of the relevance of the paper, or even better, via the development of an algorithm that allows a paper (or actually any source of scientific information) to gain relevance normalized to its field. Then Nature, Science, Cell, etc can provide, opinion, commentary and recommendations. To me this is not that different from where publishing is going in general, since today I get my news from Google News and the Blogosphere, while I read the New York Times and the BBC for opinion and commentary.

Preprint servers will also play a huge role in the future as well (I have started using Nature Precedings quite a bit lately). Again, I haven’t quite synthesized the synergy between the model described above and preprint servers, and how all the information should be indexed, etc. Since I don’t publish anymore, although would love to in a PLoS One, Nature Precedings kind of environment, it would be interesting to find out what others think.

Where will scientific publishing end up in a decade, given the changes being driven by the internet to publishing models, content distribution, copyright, accessibility, etc?

Update:There is a very relevant post by Jon Udell that people should go read NOW.

Technorati Tags: Scienceblogging.com, Scienceblogging Conference, Scientific Publishing