Comments on: What is a Scientific Paper?

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:45:09 +0000

@John Scared? By what were you scared?

By: John Washburh

John Washburh — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:33:52 +0000

When I first read this article I must admit I got pretty scared. But, after some moments, I said to my self: “there’s nothing to worry about, It’s just an article about scientific papers” so I calmed down and, nowadays, I can say I live a very good life. Thank you all, specially the author who made clear, at list to me, some very dark points here with elegance and very effectively.

By: knmnyn (knmnyn)

knmnyn (knmnyn) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 08:54:53 +0000

Twitter Comment

[link to post] what is publishing?

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By: Dimps18

Dimps18 — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 04:49:32 +0000

The arguments about online publishing put forth in the article as well as the reference links cited, is indeed convincing about the whole lot of online publications and blogs. However, the concern always remain about the validity and reliability of these publications. Nevertheless, they do provide a good food for thinking process in the proposed direction which can lead to setting up a new research idea/question for study.

A very good synonymous scenario that i can immediately think of is, for example, reporting of unique cases in the form of a case report. Though one case report does not lead to any sound evidence, reporting of such anecdotal cases by several others may set the basis for future research in that direction.

However, the lack here is owing to the burden of writing for ‘publication’, on account of reasons such as a lack of time or lack of expertise in writing for peer-reviewed publications that demands much more competencies beyond just the subject knowledge, several of these unique cases remain unidentified. Thus, this leads to delay in knowledge reaching to the public/other researchers on account of which patients keep suffering. In these instances, blogs or online reporting may be supportive resources allowing ease and flexibility of reporting thus helping to propagate the incidents and experiences.

By: Michael Rowe

Michael Rowe — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 06:41:50 +0000

Thanks for a thought-provoking article. Anyone interested in the changing nature of scientific publication might be interested in having a look at Elsevier’s “Article of the future”, at http://beta.cell.com/

In my faculty, we’re planning on moving our journal online and was wondering if there were any suggestions as to an appropriate platform? We’re thinking about Joomla, as it has an active developer base and loads of plugins that would bring most of the functionality we need.

By: Andrew Sun

Andrew Sun — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 23:12:17 +0000

It depends on what we value, data or views. Sometimes I am told that views is not truer that facts, so if we have to omit one from data and views we choose views, and this makes “entirely machine readable” papers valid. But then we don’t need seminar and conferences either. Every scientist reads data from others and publishes his/hers. No angles or aspects of research are emphasized, and what’s worse, no theories are proposed. So we don’t have science following this way of thinking.

So, views are important because they help form theories, which although less truer than pieces of facts we still value much. Then the question becomes whether views and data should be shown together, in the same place. If not, it is rational to have on one hand a cold database of data (duh) while on the other a warm webinar of views, both based on Internet technologies.

Maybe it is necessary to make the theoretical type of views more ‘machine friendly’ than the casual, saloon type because the former is to show its predictability and thus subjected to later reference and should be immediately digitally comparable/compatible with that cold database of data. But the change is the separated way we treat information in this case because of their different natures when it comes to either archiving or ‘trueness’.

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 13:00:04 +0000

@Maxine Many thanks for commenting Maxine. I do have my notes from the follow-up discussion but didn’t get time to edit them into a decent shape, there were also comments from a couple of people whom I didn’t recognise in the audience who made invaluable comments but I didn’t like to quote anonymously.

By: Maxine

Maxine — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:44:25 +0000

As mentioned at the conference, I think that scientists find the filtering and editing process a valuable way to keep track of developments. I also think that one of the talks confounded the “paper” – a useful, focused if brief description of the concept of a piece of research – with the “data underlying it”. We need far more annotated, public repositories for various kinds of data – not cheap, and not cheap to maintain. Journals do and can continue to do their bit in making authors deposit their data and other materials (eg raw files from which they derived figures) in publicly accessible databases for all scientists to search/access. Both services are valuable and in my opinion necessary. Until the day when it is all done by computers and research trends emerge automatically from the mass. But we are by no means at that point yet.

By: Anibal

Anibal — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 07:53:03 +0000

What is a Scientific Paper? http://bit.ly/UBGpa
http://ff.im/77i40

By: Are recent developments in scholarly communication relevant to undergraduates? « the Undergraduate Science Librarian

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 01:08:34 +0000

[...] a major metamorphosis as blogs and new journal concepts affect how science is done. A recent report from the Science Online London 2009 conference exemplifies [...]