Current Scientific Publishing Methods Problematic

A recent examination of current scientific publishing methods shows that they are problematic at best, treating the entire process like an economic system, with publishers as bidders at an auction, authors as sellers, and the community at large as consumers. "The authors then go on to discuss a variety of economic terms that they think apply to publishing, but the quality of the analogies varies quite a bit. It's easy to accept that the limited number of high-profile publishers act as an oligarchy and that they add value through branding. Some of the other links are significantly more tenuous. The authors argue that scientific research suffers from an uncertain valuation, but this would require that the consumers — the scientists — can't accurately judge what's significant. "

Comments

change through consensus

[diraceq]

I'm a grad student in the natural sciences. Some other friends of mine and I started Labmeeting.com because we are so eager to help change the way science gets published.

The current system of peer review is inefficient, arbitrary, and hidden from public view. We definitely need something new, but, as we said in our talk at BioBarCamp a while back, change needs to be gradual enough to preserve consensus.

That's why we're starting by just trying to make research tools that are useful to scientists in their everyday professional lives.