{"id":2940,"date":"2008-09-17T11:00:35","date_gmt":"2008-09-17T11:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/09\/17\/science21-the-journal-of-stuff\/"},"modified":"2008-09-17T11:00:35","modified_gmt":"2008-09-17T11:00:35","slug":"science21-the-journal-of-stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/09\/17\/science21-the-journal-of-stuff\/","title":{"rendered":"Science21: The Journal of Stuff I Like"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another thing I thought was intriguing that came up at the Science in the 21st Century meeting wasn’t from a formal talk, but rather a conversation over dinner with Garrett Lisi and Sabine Hossenfelder about the future of publishing. Garrett was suggesting a new model of publishing, based on pulling things from the arxiv<\/a> (or something like it).<\/p>\n

The idea here is that anybody who cared to would set up a “journal,” consisting of a collection of links to papers they found worthwhile. If you wanted to know what Garrett Lisi finds interesting and useful from recent research, you would look at his “journal,” but if you prefer, say, Jacques Distler’s take on theoretical physics, you would look at his.You could imagine putting together higher-profile collections, as well, say by making a “Journal of Articles Picked by More Than N<\/i> Journals,” where N<\/i> is some integer greater than 1.<\/p>\n

This isn’t all that original an idea– as Kate noted when I mentioned it to her, it’s basically the same scheme some people have proposed for getting rid of traditional publishers in fiction. I suspect it would avoid the obvious pitfall of the fiction version, though, and elsewhere in the meeting, we heard about some software that might allow something very much like this idea.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The obvious pitfall in the fiction version of this idea is that nobody in their right mind wants to read slush. Sturgeon’s Law applies only to what’s been published, which is a tiny fraction of what gets sent to publishers by people whose enthusiasm is greater than their skill at writing. The majority of this material is just dull, but some of it is soul-crushingly awful, and it’s hard to imagine a business model that would get people to agree to spend time wading through oceans of this stuff.<\/p>\n

I think this is less of an issue for science, though, because reading papers is an essential part of what scientists have to do anyway<\/strong>. If you want to do research for a living, you need to have some acquaintance with what other researchers are up to, which means keeping an eye on the journals and the arxiv, and flagging interesting stuff as it comes up. If you’re doing that anyway, it’s not too much of a step to share the list of what you found worthwhile with the rest of the world, at which point you’re effectively publishing the Journal of Stuff I Like<\/cite>.<\/p>\n

(You could almost imagine using the tools from the aforementioned Public Knowledge Project to set this up in the manner of a real journal, with the aid-to-reading tools and everything. That’s probably more effort than anyone would be willing to put in, though, and there might be IP issues with that sort of thing…)<\/p>\n

The problem, of course, is getting this effort recognized, but one of the things I like about the idea is that it’s the sort of thing that anyone interested in changing the culture could just do<\/strong>, right now. Getting professional credit for making the effort to sift through papers might take some doing, but if people started to do this sort of thing on a regular basis, that could easily evolve out of the system.<\/p>\n

In another session of the meeting, we had a demonstration of some software that, if you tilt your head and squint, is almost doing the sort of thing Garrett was talking about. Victor Henning showed a preview of a program called Mendeley<\/a>, which is a tool for managing and sharing research articles. The demo was unfortunately cut short by some issues with the wireless network, but the bits that we saw showed some nice features– you can give it a bunch of PDF’s, for example, and it will sift through them to automatically find metadata like the title, author names, and so on, and build a library of articles, making it easier to keep track of what you read.<\/p>\n

It will also synch that library with a web-based system, allowing you to access your papers online. They’re getting backing from the people behind Last.fm<\/a>, so it will also involve some social component, including the ability to share papers between users, and get recommendations of other things that might be of interest.<\/p>\n

That last bit is the part that resembles the “Journal of Stuff I Like” bit, but I’m not sure how fully developed this is. They’re in beta now, and still have some issues to work out, both technical (how to handle copyright issues inovolved with sharing) and social (will people be too paranoid to let their rivals see what they’re reading?), but it’s a neat idea.<\/p>\n

I haven’t tried it out yet– ITS has threatened<\/s> promised to upgrade my work computer Real Soon Now, and I’m not going to install new software just to have it broken immediately. When that gets sorted out, though, I’ll definitely give it a look. If nothing else, the desktop portion would do wonders for the folder full of cryptically named PDF’s I have on my office computer…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another thing I thought was intriguing that came up at the Science in the 21st Century meeting wasn’t from a formal talk, but rather a conversation over dinner with Garrett Lisi and Sabine Hossenfelder about the future of publishing. Garrett was suggesting a new model of publishing, based on pulling things from the arxiv (or… Continue reading Science21: The Journal of Stuff I Like<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2940\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}