The Scientific Paper Is Outdated

5 views
Skip to first unread message

T Scott Plutchak

unread,
Feb 20, 2020, 3:47:34 PM2/20/20
to The Open Scholarship Initiative
Interesting commentary in the Chronicle (subscription not required) arguing that scientists should be developing software to share the results of their work rather than writing papers.  While I think there are many disciplines in which this approach would not work (clinical trials, for example) it touches provocatively on many of the issues that get mentioned on this list.  https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Scientific-Paper-Is/248045

Scott

David Wojick

unread,
Feb 20, 2020, 7:32:29 PM2/20/20
to T Scott Plutchak, The Open Scholarship Initiative
Every argument I have seen for going "beyond" the journal article suffers from the same glaring flaw, namely the beyond takes a great deal more time and skill than simply writing stuff down. As such it robs the research, to pay for communication, which is a bad deal. This case is extreme in that regard. It is also strange in that it seems to assume that science is primarily computational, rather than rational. 

Mind you I have my own candidate for going beyond the article -- the issue tree diagram. It presents the same set of atomic ideas, while also showing how these fit together. But the difference in the time and skill required, between the article and the issue tree, is like the difference between a crude sketch and an engineering drawing. Journal articles do not need that precision.

Writing is a 6000 year old technology, so it is very simple. Even better (or worse), it is based on speaking, which is as old as humanness itself. It is unlikely that a viable alternative exists or can be found.

David

On Feb 20, 2020, at 3:47 PM, T Scott Plutchak <splu...@gmail.com> wrote:

Interesting commentary in the Chronicle (subscription not required) arguing that scientists should be developing software to share the results of their work rather than writing papers.  While I think there are many disciplines in which this approach would not work (clinical trials, for example) it touches provocatively on many of the issues that get mentioned on this list.  https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Scientific-Paper-Is/248045

Scott

--
As a public and publicly-funded effort, the conversations on this list can be viewed by the public and are archived. To read this group's complete listserv policy (including disclaimer and reuse information), please visit http://osinitiative.org/osi-listservs.
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Open Scholarship Initiative" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to osi2016-25+...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/osi2016-25/BFDFD057-3D37-4AF4-A4FB-489E5AB4E7F6%40gmail.com.
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages