Sharing of Science

The New Alecksandrians

On the Gadget Show on channel five; there was an experiment where Jon Bentley used the new web to carry out the work of a GP.  A patient gave him their symptoms and Jon was able to ascertain exactly what medical condition the person was suffering with. Not once, was he not, able to pin-point the complaint and recommend a solution. 

This is where the walls of institution are crumbling.  Scientists can now publish, manage data and collaborate across institutional boundaries.  All the worlds Scientific data and research is becoming available to every single researcher without prejudice or burden.

Unrealistic you say? Not really, when you consider that conventional science publishing is both slow and expensive for users, and that these issues in turn are increasingly big problems in science. There's calls for the old paradigm to be cast away.

The problems with the 'old' issues.

Traditional journals aggregate academic papers by subject and deploy highly structured systems for evaluating and storing the accumulated knowledge of a Scientific community. Conventional Scientific publishing is both slow and expensive for users,these issues are increasingly big issues in Science. Visit any campus today and you'll hear even louder vocal cries for the old paradigm to be swept aside.  

As new forms of peer collaboration and open- access publishing emerge, this looks more likely by the day. Frustrated authors find their cutting-edge discoveries less cutting edge after old paradigm lumbering review process delayed publication. Delays of up to a year on peer reviewed academic papers. With the pace of science increasing today, that's just simply not fast enough. Other problems encountered are paid subscriptions. 

 As Scientific endeavor swells in scale and speed,however,a growing number of participants in the scientific eco-system are questioning whether the antiquated journal system is adequate to satisfy their needs.  Enough of the old paradigm. The new augmented, if not superseded- the increasing amounts of peer-to-peer collaboration.

SCIENCE GOES LARGE SCALE

Its not new you know peer-to-peer fashion is certainly nothing new in Science. Recent research suggests that collaboration is exploding. Collaboration has exploded. Papers have between two hundred and five hundred authors! A high ranked paper has got 1,681 authors. 

Knowledge aggregators need to accommodate new realities. Online databanks and the rise of large-scale Internet-mediated collaborations. The worlds largest particle accelerator is producing petabytes of raw data each year-data that will be stored,preprocessed,stored, and analyzed by teams of tens of thousands of physicists around the world.