opinion

The peer review system has been the established way to select publicated research for decades. However, this way of publishing may come to an end.

New developments in this field embrace the idea that research should not be restricted by the iron grip of the journals. The value of the authors work is debated in cyberspace, leading to a number of consequences. Disadvantages include the possibility of a deluge of junk science due to the unfiltered publishing and online abuse concerning unfairly ridiculing rival's work. On the other side scientific discovery could be accelerated and online critiques may help detect mistakes or fraud more quickly.

Already the first initiatives are present, Philica, PLoS (Public Library of Science). Online journals are not boomingly popular, as they have attracted little attention so far. However, possibilities regarding reaching a broad audience in a fast way seem promising...

(Initially posted in Applied Mechanics News on 25 July 2006)

In an entry on pay per paper, I alluded to Chris Anderson's new book, The Long Tail. It should be straightforward to collect page views or down loads or citations of individual papers in a journal. You can plot the numbers of hits of individual papers against the rankings of the papers. Here is the curve for articles in Slate. (Not sure why data stopped at top 500 hits. Why not go further to see a really long tail?) Hope someone in Applied Mechanics will show the same data for JMPS, IJSS, MOM, etc. It will be fun.

Here is the gist of Anderson's observation: If you care about the total sale, as a publisher might, then what matters is the area under the curve; the contribution of the tail may rival that of the head. This much is objective, and should not be controversial.

Now allow me to play a variation of the theme, which is admittedly subjective and possibly controversial. Let's say the net contribution of a journal to new knowledge is proportional to the area under the curve (the subjective part). Then numerous less cited papers may make a significant contribution comparable to the contribution made by the best cited papers.

If you are interested in this argument, you might as well generalize the analysis from a single journal to all journals in a field, or to all journals in science, engineering and medicine. I'm not sure if such a curve has ever been plotted, but the job should not be too hard.

Now, if you are an individual author, surely you'd like to have a lot of hits for your own papers, just as Anderson is celebrating his book becoming a best seller. However, if your job is to increase the total knowledge, as the NSF is set up to do, then you might as well pay as much attention to the long tail as to the tall head.

For many years, people accumulate personal collections of academic publications of interest in paper form. As such collections grow with time, more file cabinets and book shelves are needed for storage. First, space becomes a problem. Second, finding a specific paper could be a headache, even if the collections are well categorized.

As more and more publications become available online in recent years, people gradually switch to collect electronic versions, e.g. PDF files of papers. These files are often stored in local hard drives. Space is not an issue anymore. But again, locating a paper from hundreds of files in tens of folders still might be a heck of efforts.

Besides the difficulty in searching, other common shortcomings include:

• Locally stored, limited access flexibility.
• Personally owned, not easy to share with other people. As a result, the scale of personal collections is often limited.
• Redundently collected. Consider this: a same gem paper is manually archived by thousands of people individually.
• Statically and passively maintained. Lack of interactions among people sharing common interests.

Any better idea? Here comes Web2.0, which is all about online collaboration. Among the numerous tools enabled by Web2.0, CiteULike could be the one able to solve the above issues for us. A previous post in AMN explored the possibility to form online journal club based on CiteULike. Here is an example.

(Originally posted on Applied Mechanics News on 25 February 2006)

(Originally posted on Applied Mecahnics News on 11 March 2006)