Building a 21st century interface for science

Scientific literature is the meeting place between people and ideas at the frontiers of human knowledge. It acts as the interface for science, enabling interaction between people and the shared record of knowledge.

The responsibility of any interface is to understand and mitigate fallible human behaviours to meaningfully extend our capabilities.

real scientific understanding arises from synthesising a wide range of literature, because synthesis is the mechanism that provides the context which makes a paper understandable...Given this fact, the interface should be primarily responsible for enabling efficient synthesis

In many cases, the reader might be able to provide valuable insight that was inaccessible to the author, simply because they have had a different set of experiences. They may be able to unlock something important by applying their own knowledge in the context of the paper. Despite being highly valuable, this kind of insight isn't recorded anywhere,... See more

public goods are not public goods if the public cannot understand them

Let's take a moment to compare the beginning and the end of our 336 year journey:... It's hard to ignore that they are shockingly similar. (see image in article of publication from 1700s and today)

There may be good reason to be optimistic about non-'scientists' taking part in science....Innocentive creates prizes to incentivise a distributed global network to solve specific problems for organisations who can't solve those problems in-house. Problems can be highly technical (see image below), and span across many domains. I will reuse Michael... See more

By analogy, it should act like a Google search, in that users can ask questions of any part of the scientific record. However, it should be unlike a Google search in that it synthesises information across all search results to produce a systems-level understanding of the search query, accessible to the user through many kinds of rich, dynamic repre... See more

Much of this knowledge is highly specific, and isn't captured in the literature. We can call this 'tacit' knowledge. To this end, science isn't really the literature - the literature is a partial representation of what we know. The full range of what we know lives inside the minds of researchers.