Scientific Publishing: Enough is Enough

Whether we like it or not, research is already, easily and increasingly, published outside of journals, and so are reviews. Reforming peer review, therefore, should mean working with the way science is shared in public, not ignoring it.

What’s amazing is that the difficulty of creating this situation of “fully democratized information” is entirely economic rather than technological. What I describe with books is close to what Google Books and Amazon already have. But of course, universal free access to full content horrifies publishers, so we are prohibited from using these system... See more

David Lang: Most scientists are under tremendous pressure to constantly publish. That realization caused me to view scientific expertise through the lens of incentives. I’m nervous to use that language, because it’s the same line that conspiracy theorists use to deny and obfuscate facts, but I do think it’s the fault line.