Guardian article summarizing a recent debate on the future of scientific publishing. I like the idea of taking a step back and thinking about the best way to communicate and evaluate science, rather than simply keeping the status quo.
Stuart Taylor, the Publishing Director at the Royal Society, raised a more fundamental question about what we expect scientific authors to do. “Authors still create journals in prose-style — do we really need to produce all that text?” Taylor wondered if the traditional formats were still appropriate for presenting scientific results in the internet age. Taylor’s suggestion that the standard structure of a scientific article might be out-of-date met with some approval — and some scepticism. Could researchers sustain a coherent argument without prose?
