Seemay Chou, biologist and co-founder of the Astera Institute, writes: “In all my discussions with scientists across every sector, exactly zero think the journal system works well. ... Scientists should probably be putting out shorter narratives, datasets, code, and models at a faster rate, with more visibility into their thinking, mistakes, and... See more

The paper you just read could never be published in a scientific journal. The studies themselves are just as good as the ones Ethan and I have published in fancyjournals, but writing about science this way is verboten.

For instance, in a journal you’re not allowed to say things like “we don’t know why this happens.” You’re not allowed to admit that... See more

Journals used to be the answer; traditionally, they were tasked with filtering out poor research and curating high quality work. However, journals have fundamentally failed to scale with the explosion of research output, often taking years to review and publish while knowledge evolves at internet speed. Moreover, commercial incentive structures... See more

Journals rely on subsidies and subscriptions from institutional libraries, which pay enormous and growing costs to access articles. People outside of large institutions, without library subscriptions, are largely shut out from reading publicly funded academic research as well as reading the comments that reviewers have made on a paper. And despite... See more