Science publishing on the fast lane, plus optionally in journals
08.30.09 by Daniel Mietchen
About two weeks ago, PLoS, Google Knol and NCBI announced a potentially groundbreaking collaboration: PLoS Currents — a new platform within Knol and mirrored at NCBI — allows for rapid submission of research results to the eyes of the public prior to, or possibly instead of, formal publication.
The idea is not new — arxiv.org has been operating a preprint repository for almost two decades in the TeX-based sciences, and Nature Precedings for about two years in the remaining scientific fields. What is new here is the combination of preprints with an encyclopedia — Knol — and its embedding in the framework of a larger repository — Rapid Research Notes, operated by NCBI, the computational arm of the NIH — which is open for other publishers to join if they so wish. This way, a systematic record-keeping of information that has traditionally been transmitted only via meetings and conferences is now on the horizon.
The initiative is timely — Knol was launched last summer but the laudations around its first anniversary could easily be mistaken for obituaries (mainly because it failed to rival Wikipedia the way many had expected), while experiments with the coupling of Wikipedia contributions and formal publication have now been going on for more than half a year at the journal RNA Biology. It is also timely because indications accrue that the current scientific publishing landscape might change dramatically soon.
People at PLoS do not seem to embrace the role of merely observing these developments — they prefer to help them take shape. From this perspective, it is not surprising that PLoS would venture into wiki-like waters, though Knol is certainly not the only option for such activities.
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