Imperial College London

Henry Rzepa

I recently received two emails each with a subject line *new approaches
to research reporting*. The traditional 350 year-old model of the
(scientific) journal is undergoing upheavals at the moment with the
introduction of APCs (article processing charges), a refereeing crisis
and much more. Some argue that brand new thinking is now required. Here
are two such innovations (and I leave you to judge whether that last
word should have an appended ?).

To set the scene for the first, I will quote the abstract: "*The single
figure publication is a novel, efficient format by which to communicate
scholarly advances. It will serve as a forerunner of the
nano-publication, a modular unit of information critical for
machine-driven data aggregation and knowledge
integration*\[cite\]10.12688/f1000research.6742.1\[/cite\] The kernel of
this suggestion is (again I quote) "*We offer the idea of the
micro-publication unit, the single figure publication (SFP), to provide
scholars with a real-world, manageable method to inform research*." I
was struck by the overlap between this suggestion and the one you may
find on many of the posts on this blog, where what I refer to as [FAIR
Data](http://www.ch.imperial.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/?p=13248){target="_blank"}
is assigned a digital object identifier (DOI) and included in the
citation lists at the end of the post. The key phrase in the above
abstract is *machine-driven data aggregation and knowledge,* although
the article does not really go into any mechanisms for easily achieving
this. It is my argument that the act of assigning a DOI carries with it
the association that there is machine searchable metadata which can be
retrieved and used for the aggregation and knowledge mining. The authors
of this article, Do and Mobley, advocate adoption of nanopublications
defined by inclusion of just a single figure (notably, not a table of
results!) and some accompanying context which they claim would
reduce the unit of publication to a more tractable size. This does raise
the question of whether science needs more publications (in chemistry
alone there are said to be more than a million published each year) or
whether we should instead be concentrating our efforts on improving the
data side of things by increasing its semantic content and formalising
its structures, its preservation and curation. I certainly argue that
far too little effort has been poured into these latter activities. You
only have to look at the typical SI (supporting information) associated
with many chemistry articles to realise that in many cases they are
still hardly fit for purpose. There is one concept introduced by Do and
Mobley that also deserves mention. Their nanopublications are structured
to be read by machines, not people. They will therefore **not** be
refereed by people (my inference). They do not really discuss how else
the quality will be assessed, but of course if you treat their
nanopublication as essentially FAIR data, then it does become possible
to develop methods of machine refereeing.

The second email alerted me to an
article\[cite\]10.15200/winn.143871.12809\[/cite\] in the Winnower, a
forum that offers a bridge between "*traditional scholarly publishing
tools to traditional and non-traditional scholarly outputs---because
scholarly communication doesn't just happen in scholarly journals*".
Here, the concept of scholarly communication is extended to the *[New
Reddit Journal of
Science](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/){target="_blank"} *and
introduces the concept pioneered by reddit of the AMA, or "ask me
anything" environment. I occasionally publish some of the posts on this
blog to the Winnower, receiving in return the increasingly ubiquitous
DOI. I have also occasionally quoted these DOIs in articles submitted to
conventional chemistry journals. What we see now is the propagation of a
Winnower DOI on to e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/science/ where
anyone^†^ can post a question related to the original research
reporting. I must state that I do have some reservations about this.
Whilst it is likely that the majority of traditional scholarly reporting
is likely to receive no AMAs (just as a very high proportion of research
articles attract few if any citations in other articles over a period of
decades), it is also likely that the quality of posted AMAs may turn out
to be very low. At which point the original researcher has to make a
judgement as to whether to devote any of their increasingly precious and
fragmented time to answering them. And if few if any answers are posted
in response to an AMA, the system seems unlikely to flourish.

But what we see here are two serious attempts to develop new approaches
to research reporting, and not doubt others will emerge. To quote Yogi
Berra, the future is not what it used to be.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

^†^Anyone can also post to this blog to ask similar questions. But note
that associating an
[ORCID](http://www.ch.imperial.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/?p=13974){target="_blank"}
with such comments is highly recommended. I do not think that reddit
currently supports ORCID, but  I would argue if the intent is serious,
it certainly should.

::: {.wp_orcid_field}
[https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8635-8390](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8635-8390){target="_blank"
rel="author"}
:::


I recently received two emails each with a subject line
<em>
 new approaches to research reporting
</em>
. The traditional 350 year-old model of the (scientific) journal is undergoing upheavals at the moment with the introduction of APCs (article processing charges), a refereeing crisis and much more. Some argue that brand new thinking is now required.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Single Figure (nano)publications, reddit AMAs and other new approaches to research reporting