OpenWetWare talk:Information management/a model for novel publishing

Recent articles on peer review and publishing

• 8/6/06 Nature peer review debate
  • Lucks 20:09, 8 August 2006 (EDT): Nature peer review debate: Erik Sandewall This article has a great concept. They are basically implementing a system that we might eventually offer on OWW (they call it review, whereby authors get feedback from the community through comments). I think we can implement unmoderated 'review' through a voting system (see Reddit idea). If this works well enough, I don't think there would be a need for their second step of closed-door refereeing.
• 8/6/06: New Yorker "Societies create structures of authority for producing and distributing knowledge, information, and opinion. These structures are always waxing and waning, depending not only on the invention of new means of communication but also on political, cultural, and economic developments." Thanks for the e-mail about this Natalie.
• I think that one of the issues the article raises above is that news from blogs and web sources cannot be relied upon in the same way that news from traditional resources can. I think that this is true, but also why OpenWetWare is different, because we are building an on-line community of scientists, I think that we are developing that trust and reliability that you get from a mainstream outlet. Just some thoughts. --Johncumbers 21:39, 6 August 2006 (EDT)
  • Jasonk 23:29, 6 August 2006 (EDT): I don't think that holds accross all of OWW unless we have more stringent rules over providing accounts. There can be sections of OWW that are more trusted because someone with credibilty (e.g. their scientific repuation) has attached their name to it, but as it stands you can't say all content on OWW is reliable because we just aren't limiting edit access that heavily. (not suggesting we do).
  • Natalie: I think another issue the article raises that might be worth considering in this discussion is that online journalists may have noble aspirations to cover things that the mainstream press "doesn't, can't, won't, or have already screwed up" but the output of such efforts more often reads like opinion and commentary. In other words, the civic press still needs to prove itself as a means of presenting information that will be meaningful on long time scales and to outgrow its newsletter appearance. Maybe OWW is just the mechanism for that or maybe it will be grouped into lesser efforts. I also was interested to read how blogs share, at least superficially, some aspects of other revolutionary communication devices (like pamphlets), whose days in the sun have come and gone. Ultimately, I think, the article wanted to make the point that the traditional press has shortcomings but the online press of the people will have step it up a notch before its respected as a replacement. Not a bad problem to have I suppose but also not a simple problem.
• See nature idea for text mining http://blogs.nature.com/wp/nascent/2006/04/open_text_mining_interface_1.html
  • Lucks 17:57, 2 August 2006 (EDT): This seems right up the alley of your idea Jonh - or at least a technical implementation to achieve some of your ideas. Perhaps OWW can work with publishers to figure out what kind of markup to use (ATOM,RDF) and how to markup (what tags) a document?