The Future of the Journal? Integrating research data with scientific discourse

To advance the pace of scientific discovery we propose a conceptual format that forms the basis of a truly new way of publishing science. In our proposal, all scientific communication objects (including experimental workflows, direct results, email conversations, and all drafted and published information artifacts) are labeled and stored in a great, big, distributed data store (or many distributed data stores that are all connected).

Each item has a set of metadata attached to it, which includes (at least) the person and time it was created, the type of object it is, and the status of the object including intellectual property rights and ownership. Every researcher can (and must) deposit every knowledge item that is produced in the lab into this repository.

With this deposition goes an essential metadata component that states who has the rights to see, use, distribute, buy or sell this item. Into this grand (and system-wise distributed, cloud-based) architecture, all items produced by a single lab, or several labs, are stored, labeled and connected.

URL : http://precedings.nature.com/documents/4742/version/1

Researchers’ attitude to using institut…

Researchers’ attitude to using institutional repositories : a case study of the Oslo University Institutional Repository (DUO) :

“Institutional Repositories (IRs) have been considered one of the disseminating and preserving method for scholarly research publications. However, the success of IR is dependent on the contribution of researchers and faculty members. In order to investigate researchers’ attitudes and their contribution to the Institutional repository a survey was conducted by taking 43 researchers as a sample study at the University of Oslo. The findings indicated that researchers were found to have a low level awareness of the Institutional repository but were interested in contributing their research work to the university institutional repository and have a positive attitude towards providing free access to scholarly research results of the University of Oslo.”

URL : https://oda.hio.no/jspui/handle/10642/426

Towards Scholarly Communication 2.0: Pee…

Towards Scholarly Communication 2.0: Peer-to-Peer Review & Ranking in Open Access Preprint Repositories :

“In this paper we present our unified peer-to-peer review model for Open Access preprint repositories. Its objective is to improve the efficiency and effectivity of digital scholarly communication. The key elements of this model are standardized quality assessment instruments, public and private communication channels, special rankings and novel incentives. The model allows scholars to proficiently evaluate both the manuscripts and their peer reviews. These scrutinized manuscripts and peer reviews will then be made available to the relevant parties. These standardized quality assessments allow for new quality metrics for papers and peer reviews. The Reviewer Impact, which represents the peer review proficiency and peer review output of scholars, is one such metric. The model includes diverse rankings for scholars to appear in to receive better odds of having their own manuscripts noticed, read, peer reviewed and cited. Their specific ranking is proportional to their Reviewer Impact and the overall quality of their manuscripts. The Open Access preprint repository model is a suitable foundation for our model because of its high degree of accessibility, but little to no certification of its deposited manuscripts. With this combination we envision a novel, Open Access, peer-to-peer scholarly communication model that functions independently of, but not incompatibly with, the traditional journal publishing model: Scholarly Communication 2.0.”

URL : http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1681478