Published October 20, 2006 | https://doi.org/10.59350/7sm29-4cy26

Is "peer-review" holding back innovation?

Creators & Contributors

As part of my talk at Open Scholarship I'm going to show two pieces of scholarly work of which I am proud, which I believe fit all the criteria of publication and for which I get no formal credit. (I also regard this blog as a scholarly work, and also get no credit)…
The first is an invited talk at Google. (Yes, I can claim some minor formal credit for an invited talk, but probably not to a company!) This was videoed and has received 1727 downloads and 12 5-star ratings. (Of course some of this may be donw by robots or my friends, and probably some of them only watch the first few minutes, but there must be some serious viewers). It has everything a scientific publication requires:

  • accessible
  • peer-reviewable
  • formal record
  • re-usable
  • archivable (When I have time I'll put it in our DSpace…)

The second is our WorldWideMolecularMatrix (WWMM). This is an evolving system for open access to the world's molecules and properties and as part oif it we have put 175, 000 objects in the Cambridge DSpace. But it has never been formally published in a full paper. That's partly because it's not finsihed and partly beacuse everyone can see it. Why publish it?
But it has been peer-reviewed! Someone – I have no idea whom – started a Wikipedia entry. I'm naturally proud of this. The entry quotes extensively from the talk I gave at OAI4 in 2005 at CERN ("CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI4)" ) (Video). Joanne Yeomans recorded this talk as a video and this has – I gather – been regularly accessed. Again it has most of the features of a publication – but I can't get any formal credit for it.
So to the current UK Research assessment exercise (RAE) – 4 citable papers in peer-reviewed journals does not allow for this type of innovation in scholarly publishing. Should I abandon the new approaches and concentrate on paper? It's what the management would like…

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Description

As part of my talk at Open Scholarship I'm going to show two pieces of scholarly work of which I am proud, which I believe fit all the criteria of publication and for which I get no formal credit. (I also regard this blog as a scholarly work, and also get no credit)… The first is an invited talk at Google.

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Issued
2006-10-20T09:14:00Z
Updated
2006-10-20T09:14:00Z