An App for Papers?
14/07/11 14:31 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Submitted by S. Pelech - Kinexus on Thu, 07/14/2011 - 14:31.
At Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation, we shall soon be launching Kinetica Online to provide open access to our databases and original research articles. I agree with Joe Pickrell that the current journal system is fast becoming obsolete on many fronts, including mounting costs (author page charges, user subscription fees, need for advertising revenues), publication speed (it can take up to a year or more for publication with typical manuscript review, resubmission and production times), labour (identification of suitable editors and expert reviewers as well as back and forth correspondences), environmental problems (e.g. use of paper and transportation of printed matter) and the fact that few scientists actually search online for articles based on the reputations of scientific journals. In the end, it is the number of times that a particular scientific paper is quoted that counts and not the impact factor of the journal that it appears in.
With Kinetica Online, our goal is to make our databases and research articles freely and easily accessible. We plan to allow the readers to add commentaries of their own with the requirement that they flag any deficiencies, provide supporting findings or make a meaningful contribution to the subject of the article. We believe that such peer-review by the scientific community at large will be far more rigorous than reviews by two or three anonymous individuals that are solicited by journal editors. We hope to launch Kinetica Online by September of this year so it will be interesting to see how the scientific community will respond to this initiative.
The recently announced plans for three of major charitable research foundations to produce their own journal is a step in the same general direction. Perhaps various major universities in the world might launch their own websites for publication of the research findings from their faculty and let the broad global community provide peer-review post-publication. The suitability of these faculty for promotion and tenure could be evaluated based on the number of times their publications have been downloaded, the feedback commentaries on their publications, and the number of times their work has been cited in other publications. Some universities already have their own publishing venues for books. May be now is the right time to extend this to scientific articles.
Link to the original blog post.
At Kinexus Bioinformatics Corporation, we shall soon be launching Kinetica Online to provide open access to our databases and original research articles. I agree with Joe Pickrell that the current journal system is fast becoming obsolete on many fronts, including mounting costs (author page charges, user subscription fees, need for advertising revenues), publication speed (it can take up to a year or more for publication with typical manuscript review, resubmission and production times), labour (identification of suitable editors and expert reviewers as well as back and forth correspondences), environmental problems (e.g. use of paper and transportation of printed matter) and the fact that few scientists actually search online for articles based on the reputations of scientific journals. In the end, it is the number of times that a particular scientific paper is quoted that counts and not the impact factor of the journal that it appears in.
With Kinetica Online, our goal is to make our databases and research articles freely and easily accessible. We plan to allow the readers to add commentaries of their own with the requirement that they flag any deficiencies, provide supporting findings or make a meaningful contribution to the subject of the article. We believe that such peer-review by the scientific community at large will be far more rigorous than reviews by two or three anonymous individuals that are solicited by journal editors. We hope to launch Kinetica Online by September of this year so it will be interesting to see how the scientific community will respond to this initiative.
The recently announced plans for three of major charitable research foundations to produce their own journal is a step in the same general direction. Perhaps various major universities in the world might launch their own websites for publication of the research findings from their faculty and let the broad global community provide peer-review post-publication. The suitability of these faculty for promotion and tenure could be evaluated based on the number of times their publications have been downloaded, the feedback commentaries on their publications, and the number of times their work has been cited in other publications. Some universities already have their own publishing venues for books. May be now is the right time to extend this to scientific articles.
Link to the original blog post.