I posted last week that Steve and I were thinking about our avenues for publication. We basically weighed whether we should go the traditional route to publish in a peer review journal or just skip all that and write up an article and just post it here in my notebook or some other easily accessible location that is search engine optimized. After receiving feedback from Bill Hooker, I’m leaning towards a more traditional post, but I started thinking about all the options available to me and it made me excited for the future of science publishing.

As much as it pains me to say, closed peer-review publication is not going away anytime soon. This option will be available to scientists for at least the next 5 years (I wanted to say a longer time, but I am holding out hope that the 99% will topple the 1% when it comes to access to information). Right now there is a working business model for publishers and as long as that doesn’t change, neither will the method. But that doesn’t mean all is wrong in the world, after all we are shifting towards…

Open peer-review publications, with PLoS leading the charge and many other publishers following suit. As I understand it, to go this method, a scientist must front the money to have an open access article and publishers supplement that income with ad supported revenue (like every other online business). Hopefully publishing costs come down so more scientists would be inclined to travel this road. The more that scientists will request this kind of access to their information, the more change we’ll see on this front.

I personally feel that something like 90% of scientific information (discoveries?) will be published via one of the two options above for at least the next 20 years, with open access publishing quickly leading the charge in about 5 years. That is all subject to change of course because of how social media has changed traditional methods of communication and journalism. As younger scientists become PI’s and research scientists, the shift will happen and hopefully sooner than my time frame.

But what about the 10% that I left out? Surely there will be those of us who will want to pursue other avenues of publishing scientific discoveries to push the boundaries of scientific knowledge. I myself am one of those scientists and am constantly looking for ways to push the envelope. As Bill mentioned in a comment on anther post, I may be doing this for the sake of rebelling, but even if that is the case at least someone is rebelling!

But what other avenues could there be?

Well the best thing since sliced bread is going to become open notebook science! As people want to understand more about the world around them, they have turned to search engines to find answers. And those search engines point everyone to mostly the right places for their answers, Wikipedia being one of the largest sources of knowledge. But now there will be results from new unknown websites that come up in the top 10 for search results. Those links will direct visitors to notebooks of real scientists performing real research in real time.

Get real!

Oh I am! And the visitors will have access to (hopefully) accurate and scrutinized data that would be more reliable than waiting for a journalist’s understanding of the latest and greatest experiment.

To me, open notebooks lead to self publication. Google Scholar searches millions of sites for publication type documents. They will want to stay in the forefront of searching (so they can make money off advertising) and will begin to search notebooks for publication type articles as well. And once scientists learn that their information will be even more accessible because of search engines, I feel they will shift towards this method of publication, but ever so slowly.

With self publication I could see a scientist writing a formal review of the latest batch of experiments he has posted in his notebook, complete with links to the appropriate posts about methods, preliminary and revised data, and personal thoughts. After the review is complete he/she could post the “paper” to his notebook/personal site and open it up to public scrutiny.

There is an important aspect to this that I have yet to mention. A scientist should have a decent network for communication. If this is the case these would be the people that you would most rely on to criticize your newly published paper. All comments and revisions would be publicly accessible via the notebook. I’d like to point out that sites like this exist now and aren’t terribly successful, but hopefully this will change in the future.

An easier way to self publish would be to write your publication and then post it to an online repository like Scribd or SlideShare. These sites are pretty active communities of people who share documents and presentations much like youtube users share videos. In all honesty, I have no idea how users find information on these sites, but I have documents on both sites (scribd and slideshare) and somehow they do. I could very easily see someone using this in conjunction with other self publishing methods to maximize their reach.

But what if you really wanted to think outside the box? Everyone seems to be shifting from actual books to electronic versions of these books. Online stores like Amazon and iTunes have made it easy to publish an authored work with next to no expense from the author. Could scientists take advantage of this somehow?

Before you jump on me and demand the answer to be no, think about this. By publishing with Amazon (for example) you could charge $0.10 per download. This would ensure you cover costs with the online publisher and allow for maximum accessibility (without it being free). Sure you are inducing a cost to the reader and science isn’t about making money (to some people), but you could fund your lab with the revenue generated from these nearly costless purchases. 1000 downloads is $100 which is a small piece of equipment, 1000000 downloads is $100000, which is a very nice piece of equipment!

Obviously the idea isn’t perfect but it could have some potential great benefits if worked out well enough.

Keep in mind that most of the ideas here haven’t even been explored yet. Right now everyone publishes in some sort of peer reviewed journal whether it is open access or closed access. And also note that these are just some ideas from a potentially insane young scientist, but they aren’t pipe dreams either. There is a very real chance that self publications are going to appear and soon!

I, personally, look forward to being one of the pioneers of this reality, very soon!