Government Social Research
The death of the scientific paper - article in The Scientist, 20 September 2006 suggests that the scientific manuscript has outlived its usefulness. Genome-scale inquiry and high-throughput experimentation yield enormous data sets, straining the established article framework; meanwhile, isolated findings or negative results are seldom published at all. Further, it has become obvious that preserving data in its native digital format - with search, annotation, and update capabilities - is desirable ... The future of scientific data lies in digital storage and access. It makes sense to revamp academic publishing now to ensure efficient database deposit.
The article says that "the typical reader scans general information first - press coverage, textbooks, and high-level descriptions - before exploring in greater detail e.g. through ... abstracts, conference presentations, and online data sets. Scientific information is exchanged in a multi-tiered manner, and these myriad other channels render the scientific manuscript optional, if not obsolete. ...The driving force behind data integration should not be a single American entity; instead, it should be a collaborative effort driven by journals: decentralized information, central access. This central index would add value by cataloging and interrelating disparate data sources ... Community annotation and discussion would add another dimension to peer review, and interested parties of all pedigrees could access information at a level suitable to their needs ... Today, considerable resources are poured into extracting data from journal articles; indeed, many databases are still hand-curated by dedicated staff. There will be some up-front costs to implementing this system, but a transition to include machine-readable output will soon pay for itself. Forget "publish or perish." Academic publishing must diversify or die."