Web publishing changes science? Not yet!
The web has not become the tool of choice for disseminating scientific research, despite the fact that Tim Berners Lee’s original hope was precisely that. The reason for this failure is not that the web is a trivial medium used to peddle porn and trivia. The ability of the net to bring knowledge to the dimmest corners of the world is a fact. Nobody would contest the fact that the web is a tremendous dissemination medium. After all, there is no journal without a site, and rarely is an academic publication worth its salt without indexing by the major scholarly databases. The real problem is that social status in academia depends on number of papers published in peer reviewed journals, which are vetted through processes that take into account a limited number of reviewers. The Economist makes these points in a recent article very well, yet the solution it proposes, a recognized method for measuring impact for web published research, is not the sword the British publication believes capable of slicing the Gordian Knot. It would take a far deeper revolution, one that would de-bureaucratize the University and which would reshape it into a more capitalist, market-like creature, that would do the trick. The only snag, beside the conceptual oxymoron a market-driven university would be? Bureaucratic universities offer tenure. Who in his right mind would trade tenure for celebrity on the web?
Twenty years of the world wide web | What’s the score? | The Economist:
Journalists are now used to having their every article commented on by dozens of readers. Indeed, many bloggers develop and refine their essays on the basis of such input. Yet despite several attempts to encourage a similarly open system of peer review of scientific research published on the web, most researchers still limit such reviews to a few anonymous experts. When Nature, one of the world’s most respected scientific journals, experimented with open peer review in 2006, the results were disappointing. Only 5% of the authors it spoke to agreed to have their article posted for review on the web—and their instinct turned out to be right, as almost half of the papers that were then posted attracted no comments.
