In an interview with THE Biophysicist Cameron Neylon slams the current system of communicating scientific research primarily through journal articles, an archaic system that developed in the 17th century as essentially letter aggregation (as researchers tired of sending letters to each other) and aside from the introduction of peer review has not made any major innovations since. Neylon, who authors the blog Science in the Open and is an academic editor of the online journal PLoS ONE believes journal articles almost never contain enough information to allow other researchers to replicate experiments, and lots of potentially valuable research outputs are left out. Putting all of the ‘artefacts’ of the research on the web would allow scienctists to find and work with relevant information while preserving academics’ ‘obsession with legacy.’ Articles still have a role to play, he says, and it will be difficult to separate the scientific wheat from the chaff, but overall he believes it is better to publish everything and let readers make judgments about quality.
For more discussion on moving research to the open web see Chapter 9 of the Project’s handbook, available here.