A few days before Jim Gray sadly disappeared, I exchanged emails with him on a set of slides which are now a chapter in the Fourth Paradigm. There’s one slide in there that I wanted to share
click for full size
In this slide (the narrative can be found in the Fourth Paradigm), Jim states a belief I share. That the internet can do a lot more than just make the text of research papers available. The whole point of the Web as a platform for scientific discovery is lost until we can unify scientific data with literature in the sort of pyramid shown above. To be able to jump between paper, data, commentary, reviews, further analysis, etc. The interesting concept Jim brings up is overlay journals. An overlay journal is one where you have data archives and literature archives with appropriate content going into the appropriate place (whether it’s actual context or a distributed index is a different story). One should, in theory, with the raw data, appropriate APIs etc, be able to construct a meta-journal around an interest area (The collections on Nature Precedings, and similar efforts at PLoS come to mind). Perhaps we could do with pre-publication repositories, or create loosely coupled peer-reviewed journals. I’d like to see publishers and web science types (Timo?) push the envelope here.
The internet, publishing, and data
A few days before Jim Gray sadly disappeared, I exchanged emails with him on a set of slides which are now a chapter in the Fourth Paradigm. There’s one slide in there that I wanted to share
click for full size
In this slide (the narrative can be found in the Fourth Paradigm), Jim states a belief I share. That the internet can do a lot more than just make the text of research papers available. The whole point of the Web as a platform for scientific discovery is lost until we can unify scientific data with literature in the sort of pyramid shown above. To be able to jump between paper, data, commentary, reviews, further analysis, etc. The interesting concept Jim brings up is overlay journals. An overlay journal is one where you have data archives and literature archives with appropriate content going into the appropriate place (whether it’s actual context or a distributed index is a different story). One should, in theory, with the raw data, appropriate APIs etc, be able to construct a meta-journal around an interest area (The collections on Nature Precedings, and similar efforts at PLoS come to mind). Perhaps we could do with pre-publication repositories, or create loosely coupled peer-reviewed journals. I’d like to see publishers and web science types (Timo?) push the envelope here.
Related articles by Zemanta