BMJ No 7123 Volume 315
Education and debate Saturday 20/27 December Christmas 1997 issue
"Papers" will still exist
Peter Newmark, Vitek Tracz
The very term "paper" is inescapably bound up with the printed word and has no real place in the context of "online." It carries with it clear notions of space limits, formats, and information packaging that have become an integral part of the way science is currently communicated.
Printed papers are the manifestation of the quantum theory of publishing. Scientists accumulate data, publish them, and repeat the process over and over again.
The size of papers varies somewhat, with authors intent on increasing their publication list slicing their work much more thinly than others, but quanta are inherent to print publishing.
Online publishing could hardly be more different. Gone is the need to print discrete quanta of information that are forever fossilised in their moment of time. Instead the wave theory of publishing can manifest itself. Online publications can change with time, recording the development of ideas as research progresses. Publications could be regularly archived as a historical record, but the live publication would evolve continuously. Moreover, all collected data would be attached to the publication so that, although the authors would still select what they need to make their point, readers would be able to access all the data and apply their own interpretation - in all probability with a set of customised artificial intelligence tools.
But we have to admit that there is not a chance that this is what an online publication will be like in five years' time. To make such radical changes, a whole set of ingrained ways will need to be changed. For example, the refereeing system for papers, which is built on the premise that small discrete quanta will be reviewed, will need to evolve to cope with the wave theory of publishing, as will the idea that promotion can be based on measuring discrete quanta of publications. This may take not five but 50 years.
| In five years' time, online publications will still closely resemble
papers, albeit with added bells and whistles. Some will contain many
more data than can be squeezed into a printed paper: perhaps the raw
data as well as the distilled version, and the graphical results of all
experiments instead of a "typical example." Movies or animations
will replace or complement the static illustrations of printed papers.
References will be linked to the full text of the referenced paper and
to |  |  |
And we'll probably still be busy thinking up a new name for the online scientific "paper" of the future.
Current Biology Ltd,
London W1P 6LB
Peter Newmark,
editor,
Current
Biology
Vitek Tracz,
chairman,
Current Science
Group
Correspondence to: Dr Newmark
email: peter@cursci.co.uk
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