20 ms·

Shameless plug: I'm working at the MIT Media Lab on the PubPub project (http://www.pubpub.org http://www.pubpub.org), a free platform for totally open publishin

by joelg 10y ago

Shameless plug: I'm working at the MIT Media Lab on the PubPub project (http://www.pubpub.org http://www.pubpub.org), a free platform for totally open publishing designed to solve a lot of these problems: One is peer review, which, as some have already mentioned, needs to be done in an open, ongoing, and interactive forum. Making peer review transparent to both parties (and the public) makes everyone more honest. Another is the incentive of publication itself as the ultimate goal. Instead, we need to think of documents as evolving, growing bodies of knowledge and compilations of ongoing research. Every step of the scientific process is important, yet most of it is flattened and compressed and lost, like most negative results, which are ditched in search of sexy click-bait headliner results. Another is the role of publishers as gatekeepers and arbiters of truth. We need a medium in which anyone can curate a journal, and in which submission, review, and acceptance procedures are consistent and transparent. Another is the nature of the medium itself. It's 2016, and these dead, flat, static PDFs are functionally identical to the paper they replaced! Insert your favorite Bret Victor/Ted Nelson rant here: we need modern, digitally-native documents that are as rich as the information they contain. Another is reproduciblity. We should be able to see the code that transformed the raw dataset, tweak it, and publish our own fork, while automatically keeping the thread of attribution. The list goes on and on...

p4bl0 10y ago
Hi! I really think what you are doing here is great and I hope you will succeed! Is there a way to test the platform without creating to much garbage? Like a sandbox version maybe?
- joelg 10y ago
  Everything is open-sourced, and we've tried to document as much as possible to make it easy for people to host their own instances! Alternatively, you can just create arbitrarily many drafts without publishing any of them. https://github.com/pubpub/pubpub https://github.com/pubpub/pubpub
  - p4bl0 10y ago
    Running my own instance is a bit heavy just to try the platform :). But thanks for the tips, I can create draft and delete them without trashing your instance. The fact that it is open source is a major positive point. I suppose you have heard of SJS [1] which in a way is very close to what PubPub is, except I do not believe in SJS because of it being closed source: it is way too unsafe for a scientific community to take the risk of adopting such a media for a new journal or a conference as the platform is not open and there is a risk of Elsevier buying it to shut it down or closing it even more, for instance. [1] http://sjscience.org/ http://sjscience.org/
    - __mbm__ 10y ago
      > and there is a risk of Elsevier buying it to shut it down Yup. I'm still stung by Mendeley's sale to Elsevier.
  - p4bl0 10y ago
    If you don't mind I have a few questions :). – PubPub doesn't seem to have math support, is that right? I think that should be a very high priority. – LaTeX import is also really important (but this supposes that math is supported), is that on the roadmap? – Related question: is there a way to work offline in my usual text editor and collaborate with my usual tools (git, svn, whatever) and then import my paper in PubPub?
    - joelg 10y ago
      Of course! Importing from markdown/latex/git, export to PDF/XML/etc, and lots more are coming (not in that order). We're still in very active development, so there's a lot left ahead on our roadmap. If anyone is serious and passionate about helping out, we're hiring!
      - p4bl0 10y ago
        Had I not landed a position in academia, this is really the type of project I would have love to work on if I had to do engineering rather than research ;). But I really hope I can contribute as a user in the future :).
jessriedel 10y ago
So I'm very interested in going beyond PDFs, but I can't for the life of me figure out what PubPub intends to do. I get that there's an online collaboration engine, as is offered by many places like Authorea, ShareLaTeX, Overleaf, and FindusWriter. What does PubPub do differently here?
- joelg 10y ago
  Plugins and views! We're currently working on a significant architecture refactor that will enable 3rd party plugins to view arbitrary data assets inline, like a reactive spreadsheet or a D3 visualization. We're also working on deeper, richer hyperlinks between documents that would let you reference or quote other publications in the system with arbitrary resolution (down to the section/paragraph/sentence/number).
  - jessriedel 10y ago
    OK. Color me skeptical...
    - joelg 10y ago
      That’s fair. We think it’s important to be able to reference anything within the system with arbitrary resolution, so that’s our goal. Whether that implements well or not is certainly a technical challenge, but hard problems are the fun ones, right?
      - Ralfp 10y ago
        I think the point being made was that already existing sites didn't change the status quo, and so you'll need something much better to achieve what they failed to.
bixiou 10y ago
This is great job! Congrats !!!!
bixiou 10y ago
If I might give my opinion on which features PubPub should implement next: - adding "Math in-line $$" in Formatting menu - enabling upload of LaTeX files - enabling upload of PDFs, to store on PubPub existing research (combined by via.hypothes.is, one can annotate PDFs, which is in the spirit of PubPub) - include some interesting features of SJS like grading, download as PDF, add to personal library... I am impressed at the job you've done for a graduate project ! Best wishes :-)
- joelg 10y ago
  Haha - not my project, I just work on it for now. But thanks for the great ideas!
- freyfogle 10y ago
  Why reinvent this wheel? Why not instead (also) partner with people like Overleaf who already have many of these features? https://www.overleaf.com https://www.overleaf.com
  - quadrangle 10y ago
    that appears to be totally proprietary
    - apathy 10y ago
      not really https://github.com/overleaf https://github.com/overleaf Some parts of it are (duh?) but overall the system is astoundingly transparent. I think they ended up charging for the sync-to-git option, but if you look at the above repos, it appears that this feature can actually be pulled on the user end rather than just pushed from Overleaf. Overleaf integrates nicely with existing journals and with preprint servers to some extent; I've bugged them for some time to support MarkDown (I don't care to use LaTeX for manuscripts which don't have much math) but as yet they have not implemented it. It may be an issue with the backend, although even that should be surmountable.
      - 10y ago
suchsciencewow 10y ago
How are you planning on addressing the fact that none of this matters in the slightest if academic career growth/incentives/reputation specifically revolves around publishing boring pdfs in established journals? What do I gain by sending my work to your platform where the first question anyone in my "target audience" will ask is "why didn't this get published in a real journal, whats wrong with it?", and I will get essentially zero resume kudos points for it? Keeping in mind that it took me at least many months to do the work, I don't exactly have an abundance of papers to throw around, and my officemate almost certainly will submit work of similar quality to a traditional journal and reap the benefits of that. Just saying, my decision to publish in traditional journals isn't as much as a decision as it is a requirement of the very career I am attempting to pursue.
- iheartmemcache 10y ago
  In mathematics, Perelman posted his beautiful 3 part proof to Poincare to arXiv and within a day there was allegedly hype (or so reputed professors report, while I did go into advanced alg. top. later, I was 14 at the time). Professors (the same professors who'd referee) were independently reviewing Part 1 within 24 hours and this was in 2002. Then you have a Fields Medal winner Voevodsky who also bitches about having a paper stuck in peer-review limbo for three years.[0] In cosmology (I am not a physicist in the slightest, but I have enough mathematical background s.t. I can watch lower graduate level classes without too much difficulty in a recreational capacity), pre-prints get e-mailed around daily, such that if Lenny Susskind posts something on evening-{n}, morning-{n+1} will have most of the field commenting on it. In biological sciences (again, just from hear say mind you) I understand it's different (e.g. in medicine, specifically, my uncles/father/their colleagues and students are all concerned with the impact factor of their papers and/or their doctoral students papers). I also realize some journals have a "no preprint" policy. But a lot of heavy hitters (Nature, Elsevier, Springer[1]) allow the circulation of pre-prints now. So it's not a binary decision between one or the other in some cases. (And in the instances where you are able to submit pre-prints to online, if you've made a mistake, a colleague could inform you and you can issue a retraction hopefully before the $month+1's Nature Methods hits physical press.) --- Side-bar, skip over if you don't care about proof theory, type theory, constructive logic, univalent foundations, or category theory [0] Vlad on Univalent Foundations http://www.math.ias.edu/vladimir/files/univalent_foundations_project.pdf http://www.math.ias.edu/vladimir/files/univalent_foundations... Interestingly enough, for you category theory fans, Vlad has recently become a huge proponent of Homotopy theory[0.b]. Everyone knows Wildberger has kookie ideas w/r/t infinitesimals but Vlad too shares the same 'feeling[0.a]' that analysis (and to a lesser extent axiomatic set theory) just doesn't 'feel' foundationally correct. He's a huge proponent of Coq, Agda and dependent typing instead. Princeton's IAS put out the seminal text that's worth a read. No advanced mathematics required (or even advanced CS knowledge, it's all self-contained). [0.a] I can't really put into words what the 'feeling' is any more than describing why some people find algebraic proofs more elegant than analytic or geometric. But in the same way that there's mathematical beauty [0.a.i] well agreed upon, this 'gut feeling' too is agreed upon amongst those who fall into a certain category (pun not intended) [0.a.i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_beauty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_beauty [0.b] https://homotopytypetheory.org/book/ https://homotopytypetheory.org/book/ -- think of this as the best minds in aggregate sit down at Princeton to write one of the best texts on Proof theory, type theory and logic. Practical Foundations for Programming Languages (Robert Harper) is a good companion text. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_preprint_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_p...
gkya 10y ago
> [W]e need modern, digitally-native documents that are as rich as the information they contain. It's best to separate interactive parts from the non interactive. When I read papers I always print them because I can take notes, underline, draw shapes, comment etc. all in-line with a pen that I'll buy from a closest little shop if I don't have one with me. It is more convenient that any software tool out there, because there is basically no limitation to how I'll use the pen on the (actual) paper. But how will I be able to print a video, or a graphic that has some controls to be fiddled with? But they can be provided separately, and if I have the mediums, I'll use also them.
lkrubner 10y ago
"anyone can curate a journal" What does the word "anyone" mean? If you literally mean anyone, then you are getting rid of the idea of "peer", in which case you seem to be excessively idealistic. Even Wikipedia eventually had to impose limits.
yayday 10y ago
What's wrong with PDFs? PDFs are great because it's a downloadable format and when I create one I know that what I see is what other people will see. The same can not be said for a website format where people use different browsers, different devices, and different versions of different software. I just don't see what's wrong with using PDFs. If I want to read one of the papers on your website on my phone when I don't have Internet, how do I do it? If I just keep the page open on my phone's browser it's just going to go away at some point as my phone's OS clears the browser's cache to make room for other apps that I'm actively using. With PDFs I can just open the pdf I've downloaded.
- apathy 10y ago
  any standardized downloadable format (to include VMs or AMIs) also fits these criteria. PDFs aren't inherently bad, but on occasion they are not the best tool to communicate results. For example, Sean Morrison's recent paper on live-imaging stem cells in vivo benefited greatly from inclusion of movies showing the live-processed data. Their point was that live adult stem cells can be imaged, and this revealed niche biology. The only way to support this was to provide the proof, and MPEG did this nicely. Agreed regarding permanent vs ephemeral, though.
teacup50 10y ago
I agree with most of your points, but disagree strenuously with this one: It's 2016, and these dead, flat, static PDFs are functionally identical to the paper they replaced! There's a lot of value in static PDFs and how we format documents for publication. $CURRENT_YEAR doesn't invalidate good ideas from ($CURRENT_YEAR-n). Just in terms of technology, static PDFs are: - Easily distributed. - Easily archived. - Readable forever, even as platforms change incompatibly. - Readable on any device. 20 years from now, do you really want to have to run an old browser, or debug shoddy JS/HTML/whatever, just to read a paper from $CURRENT_YEAR-20?
IndianAstronaut 10y ago
JOVE, the journal of visualized experiments, is also a very interesting model.
bbctol 10y ago
I still don't... get what PubPub is. I definitely think that peer review should be updated and science should be using the internet better, I just have no idea what PubPub has to do with that mission. Is it just... a place where people can post things, and other people can comment, and other people can curate posts? So like any blogging platform? Even if used as intended, it seems like the only comments would go on things that people are already seeking out; there hasn't been a "random pub" button since it got overtaken with spam. So the use of comments to "review" is already throwing up a huge barrier to discovering new science and leveling the playing field for unrecognized researchers, exacerbating the problems of the current system. The inability to anonymize comments or posts gets rid of the most promising way the internet could affect peer review. It's hard to see what about the platform promotes evolving documents as opposed to static publications. And complex, digitally native papers are already being promoted by larger journals, with better resources to implement them, and more staff to help potentially unfamiliar scientists with the process, another aspect that could make the platform a source of exclusion and bias. I don't mean to sound to critical, I just follow both science publishing and projects coming out of the Media Lab pretty closely, and have been baffled by this one for a while. https://www.sciencematters.io/ https://www.sciencematters.io/ is doing cool things with switching from static publications to a set of growing datapoints, updated in real time, http://meta.com/ http://meta.com/ (formerly sciencescape) is dipping their toes into curating papers in a really interesting way, and even http://the-artifice.com/ http://the-artifice.com/ has a unique peer review system that I think could be implemented well in the hard sciences as well. PubPub is just like... Medium? With a little bit of GitHub, and the ethos of arXiv?
semi-extrinsic 10y ago
> Another is the nature of the medium itself. It's 2016, and these dead, flat, static PDFs are functionally identical to the paper they replaced! Well, many of the existing publishers (at least ACS, Nature group, Wiley, Science group) are already pushing hard towards something "more" than PDF, mainly for DRM reasons. And scientists in general are resisting greatly, because PDF is such an established format, supported on all devices and platforms, can be created by the tools we use, and can be shared freely amongst peers. The barrier to adoption for a new format is extremely huge.
- kaybe 10y ago
  I'm also concerned about long term readability. Some of those documents might have at least a few hundred years of people wanting to read them before them. Can any of those innovative new data formats stay around long enough, especially if they're proprietary? We might change computation platform and hardware paradigms a few times as well, just think back to 20 years ago. A lot of measured raw data is already lost due to this; it's about impossible to parse any more. Pure text can survive far more easily.
wodenokoto 10y ago
I skimmed through the site and am left with the question: where do I submit my paper?
alpineidyll3 10y ago
No need for shame with such a worthy plug+!!!!

by joelg 10y ago

p4bl0 10y ago

Hi! I really think what you are doing here is great and I hope you will succeed! Is there a way to test the platform without creating to much garbage? Like a sandbox version maybe?

joelg 10y ago
Everything is open-sourced, and we've tried to document as much as possible to make it easy for people to host their own instances! Alternatively, you can just create arbitrarily many drafts without publishing any of them. https://github.com/pubpub/pubpub https://github.com/pubpub/pubpub
- p4bl0 10y ago
  Running my own instance is a bit heavy just to try the platform :). But thanks for the tips, I can create draft and delete them without trashing your instance. The fact that it is open source is a major positive point. I suppose you have heard of SJS [1] which in a way is very close to what PubPub is, except I do not believe in SJS because of it being closed source: it is way too unsafe for a scientific community to take the risk of adopting such a media for a new journal or a conference as the platform is not open and there is a risk of Elsevier buying it to shut it down or closing it even more, for instance. [1] http://sjscience.org/ http://sjscience.org/
  - __mbm__ 10y ago
    > and there is a risk of Elsevier buying it to shut it down Yup. I'm still stung by Mendeley's sale to Elsevier.
- p4bl0 10y ago
  If you don't mind I have a few questions :). – PubPub doesn't seem to have math support, is that right? I think that should be a very high priority. – LaTeX import is also really important (but this supposes that math is supported), is that on the roadmap? – Related question: is there a way to work offline in my usual text editor and collaborate with my usual tools (git, svn, whatever) and then import my paper in PubPub?
  - joelg 10y ago
    Of course! Importing from markdown/latex/git, export to PDF/XML/etc, and lots more are coming (not in that order). We're still in very active development, so there's a lot left ahead on our roadmap. If anyone is serious and passionate about helping out, we're hiring!
    - p4bl0 10y ago
      Had I not landed a position in academia, this is really the type of project I would have love to work on if I had to do engineering rather than research ;). But I really hope I can contribute as a user in the future :).

jessriedel 10y ago

So I'm very interested in going beyond PDFs, but I can't for the life of me figure out what PubPub intends to do. I get that there's an online collaboration engine, as is offered by many places like Authorea, ShareLaTeX, Overleaf, and FindusWriter. What does PubPub do differently here?

joelg 10y ago
Plugins and views! We're currently working on a significant architecture refactor that will enable 3rd party plugins to view arbitrary data assets inline, like a reactive spreadsheet or a D3 visualization. We're also working on deeper, richer hyperlinks between documents that would let you reference or quote other publications in the system with arbitrary resolution (down to the section/paragraph/sentence/number).
- jessriedel 10y ago
  OK. Color me skeptical...
  - joelg 10y ago
    That’s fair. We think it’s important to be able to reference anything within the system with arbitrary resolution, so that’s our goal. Whether that implements well or not is certainly a technical challenge, but hard problems are the fun ones, right?
    - Ralfp 10y ago
      I think the point being made was that already existing sites didn't change the status quo, and so you'll need something much better to achieve what they failed to.

bixiou 10y ago

This is great job! Congrats !!!!

bixiou 10y ago

If I might give my opinion on which features PubPub should implement next: - adding "Math in-line $$" in Formatting menu - enabling upload of LaTeX files - enabling upload of PDFs, to store on PubPub existing research (combined by via.hypothes.is, one can annotate PDFs, which is in the spirit of PubPub) - include some interesting features of SJS like grading, download as PDF, add to personal library... I am impressed at the job you've done for a graduate project ! Best wishes :-)

joelg 10y ago
Haha - not my project, I just work on it for now. But thanks for the great ideas!
freyfogle 10y ago
Why reinvent this wheel? Why not instead (also) partner with people like Overleaf who already have many of these features? https://www.overleaf.com https://www.overleaf.com
- quadrangle 10y ago
  that appears to be totally proprietary
  - apathy 10y ago
    not really https://github.com/overleaf https://github.com/overleaf Some parts of it are (duh?) but overall the system is astoundingly transparent. I think they ended up charging for the sync-to-git option, but if you look at the above repos, it appears that this feature can actually be pulled on the user end rather than just pushed from Overleaf. Overleaf integrates nicely with existing journals and with preprint servers to some extent; I've bugged them for some time to support MarkDown (I don't care to use LaTeX for manuscripts which don't have much math) but as yet they have not implemented it. It may be an issue with the backend, although even that should be surmountable.
    - 10y ago

suchsciencewow 10y ago

How are you planning on addressing the fact that none of this matters in the slightest if academic career growth/incentives/reputation specifically revolves around publishing boring pdfs in established journals? What do I gain by sending my work to your platform where the first question anyone in my "target audience" will ask is "why didn't this get published in a real journal, whats wrong with it?", and I will get essentially zero resume kudos points for it? Keeping in mind that it took me at least many months to do the work, I don't exactly have an abundance of papers to throw around, and my officemate almost certainly will submit work of similar quality to a traditional journal and reap the benefits of that. Just saying, my decision to publish in traditional journals isn't as much as a decision as it is a requirement of the very career I am attempting to pursue.

iheartmemcache 10y ago
In mathematics, Perelman posted his beautiful 3 part proof to Poincare to arXiv and within a day there was allegedly hype (or so reputed professors report, while I did go into advanced alg. top. later, I was 14 at the time). Professors (the same professors who'd referee) were independently reviewing Part 1 within 24 hours and this was in 2002. Then you have a Fields Medal winner Voevodsky who also bitches about having a paper stuck in peer-review limbo for three years.[0] In cosmology (I am not a physicist in the slightest, but I have enough mathematical background s.t. I can watch lower graduate level classes without too much difficulty in a recreational capacity), pre-prints get e-mailed around daily, such that if Lenny Susskind posts something on evening-{n}, morning-{n+1} will have most of the field commenting on it. In biological sciences (again, just from hear say mind you) I understand it's different (e.g. in medicine, specifically, my uncles/father/their colleagues and students are all concerned with the impact factor of their papers and/or their doctoral students papers). I also realize some journals have a "no preprint" policy. But a lot of heavy hitters (Nature, Elsevier, Springer[1]) allow the circulation of pre-prints now. So it's not a binary decision between one or the other in some cases. (And in the instances where you are able to submit pre-prints to online, if you've made a mistake, a colleague could inform you and you can issue a retraction hopefully before the $month+1's Nature Methods hits physical press.) --- Side-bar, skip over if you don't care about proof theory, type theory, constructive logic, univalent foundations, or category theory [0] Vlad on Univalent Foundations http://www.math.ias.edu/vladimir/files/univalent_foundations_project.pdf http://www.math.ias.edu/vladimir/files/univalent_foundations... Interestingly enough, for you category theory fans, Vlad has recently become a huge proponent of Homotopy theory[0.b]. Everyone knows Wildberger has kookie ideas w/r/t infinitesimals but Vlad too shares the same 'feeling[0.a]' that analysis (and to a lesser extent axiomatic set theory) just doesn't 'feel' foundationally correct. He's a huge proponent of Coq, Agda and dependent typing instead. Princeton's IAS put out the seminal text that's worth a read. No advanced mathematics required (or even advanced CS knowledge, it's all self-contained). [0.a] I can't really put into words what the 'feeling' is any more than describing why some people find algebraic proofs more elegant than analytic or geometric. But in the same way that there's mathematical beauty [0.a.i] well agreed upon, this 'gut feeling' too is agreed upon amongst those who fall into a certain category (pun not intended) [0.a.i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_beauty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_beauty [0.b] https://homotopytypetheory.org/book/ https://homotopytypetheory.org/book/ -- think of this as the best minds in aggregate sit down at Princeton to write one of the best texts on Proof theory, type theory and logic. Practical Foundations for Programming Languages (Robert Harper) is a good companion text. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_preprint_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_p...

gkya 10y ago

> [W]e need modern, digitally-native documents that are as rich as the information they contain. It's best to separate interactive parts from the non interactive. When I read papers I always print them because I can take notes, underline, draw shapes, comment etc. all in-line with a pen that I'll buy from a closest little shop if I don't have one with me. It is more convenient that any software tool out there, because there is basically no limitation to how I'll use the pen on the (actual) paper. But how will I be able to print a video, or a graphic that has some controls to be fiddled with? But they can be provided separately, and if I have the mediums, I'll use also them.

lkrubner 10y ago

"anyone can curate a journal" What does the word "anyone" mean? If you literally mean anyone, then you are getting rid of the idea of "peer", in which case you seem to be excessively idealistic. Even Wikipedia eventually had to impose limits.

yayday 10y ago

What's wrong with PDFs? PDFs are great because it's a downloadable format and when I create one I know that what I see is what other people will see. The same can not be said for a website format where people use different browsers, different devices, and different versions of different software. I just don't see what's wrong with using PDFs. If I want to read one of the papers on your website on my phone when I don't have Internet, how do I do it? If I just keep the page open on my phone's browser it's just going to go away at some point as my phone's OS clears the browser's cache to make room for other apps that I'm actively using. With PDFs I can just open the pdf I've downloaded.

apathy 10y ago
any standardized downloadable format (to include VMs or AMIs) also fits these criteria. PDFs aren't inherently bad, but on occasion they are not the best tool to communicate results. For example, Sean Morrison's recent paper on live-imaging stem cells in vivo benefited greatly from inclusion of movies showing the live-processed data. Their point was that live adult stem cells can be imaged, and this revealed niche biology. The only way to support this was to provide the proof, and MPEG did this nicely. Agreed regarding permanent vs ephemeral, though.

teacup50 10y ago

I agree with most of your points, but disagree strenuously with this one: It's 2016, and these dead, flat, static PDFs are functionally identical to the paper they replaced! There's a lot of value in static PDFs and how we format documents for publication. $CURRENT_YEAR doesn't invalidate good ideas from ($CURRENT_YEAR-n). Just in terms of technology, static PDFs are: - Easily distributed. - Easily archived. - Readable forever, even as platforms change incompatibly. - Readable on any device. 20 years from now, do you really want to have to run an old browser, or debug shoddy JS/HTML/whatever, just to read a paper from $CURRENT_YEAR-20?

IndianAstronaut 10y ago

JOVE, the journal of visualized experiments, is also a very interesting model.

bbctol 10y ago

I still don't... get what PubPub is. I definitely think that peer review should be updated and science should be using the internet better, I just have no idea what PubPub has to do with that mission. Is it just... a place where people can post things, and other people can comment, and other people can curate posts? So like any blogging platform? Even if used as intended, it seems like the only comments would go on things that people are already seeking out; there hasn't been a "random pub" button since it got overtaken with spam. So the use of comments to "review" is already throwing up a huge barrier to discovering new science and leveling the playing field for unrecognized researchers, exacerbating the problems of the current system. The inability to anonymize comments or posts gets rid of the most promising way the internet could affect peer review. It's hard to see what about the platform promotes evolving documents as opposed to static publications. And complex, digitally native papers are already being promoted by larger journals, with better resources to implement them, and more staff to help potentially unfamiliar scientists with the process, another aspect that could make the platform a source of exclusion and bias. I don't mean to sound to critical, I just follow both science publishing and projects coming out of the Media Lab pretty closely, and have been baffled by this one for a while. https://www.sciencematters.io/ https://www.sciencematters.io/ is doing cool things with switching from static publications to a set of growing datapoints, updated in real time, http://meta.com/ http://meta.com/ (formerly sciencescape) is dipping their toes into curating papers in a really interesting way, and even http://the-artifice.com/ http://the-artifice.com/ has a unique peer review system that I think could be implemented well in the hard sciences as well. PubPub is just like... Medium? With a little bit of GitHub, and the ethos of arXiv?

semi-extrinsic 10y ago

> Another is the nature of the medium itself. It's 2016, and these dead, flat, static PDFs are functionally identical to the paper they replaced! Well, many of the existing publishers (at least ACS, Nature group, Wiley, Science group) are already pushing hard towards something "more" than PDF, mainly for DRM reasons. And scientists in general are resisting greatly, because PDF is such an established format, supported on all devices and platforms, can be created by the tools we use, and can be shared freely amongst peers. The barrier to adoption for a new format is extremely huge.

kaybe 10y ago
I'm also concerned about long term readability. Some of those documents might have at least a few hundred years of people wanting to read them before them. Can any of those innovative new data formats stay around long enough, especially if they're proprietary? We might change computation platform and hardware paradigms a few times as well, just think back to 20 years ago. A lot of measured raw data is already lost due to this; it's about impossible to parse any more. Pure text can survive far more easily.

wodenokoto 10y ago

I skimmed through the site and am left with the question: where do I submit my paper?

alpineidyll3 10y ago

No need for shame with such a worthy plug+!!!!