publishing 2.0 - ideas from Nature Medicine

what is the Web 2.0–driven scientific publishing world going to look like? For starters, what already is a very specialized market (people interested in, say, apoptosis) will become even more fractionated (people specifically interested in apoptosis in the developing liver of the mouse and who use detection kits from Stratagene—a set of conditions almost as strict as those you might expect to find on a dating website). Second, blogs and social-networking sites can provide a forum for giving visibility to papers published in obscure journals and deprecate articles from high-profile titles. Third, the availability of wikis that cobble together documents from the collective knowledge of their users may eventually make it unnecessary for journals to publish reviews—you could theoretically update and expand one broad review on any topic ad infinitum.

What we have, then, is a world divided into small tribes (some of which could well fit in a family minivan), in which the safety of being one of many people able to express their points of view has replaced the authority of experts, and in which, using a clever, increasingly cited paraphrase of Andy Warhol's "15 minutes of fame", everybody will eventually be famous to 15 people. In such a world, is there room for journals like Nature Medicine?

Nature Medicine 2.0 (editorial)
Nature Medicine - 13, 1 (2007)
doi:10.1038/nm0107-1

There is an accompanying posting in the Nature Medicine blog, Spoonful

One idea is that the community will increasingly do without high-profile journals to decide what an important paper is and what it is not. If many scientists get together to discuss papers in social-networking sites, they may provide visibility to papers published in obscure journals and deprecate articles from more visible titles.

If this becomes the case, and if high-profile journals make enough editorial mistakes while selecting the papers we publish, then the value of those publications will indeed go down. If this happens, then it won’t matter whether you publish in Nature Medicine or in a very specialized journal—if your paper is good, the community will appreciate it.

...

What’s your take on this matter? Do you really imagine a time when publishing in Nature or Science will stop being as meaningful as it is now? Or perhaps this question is misplaced and the impact of Web 2.0 on journals will take a totally different form. What kind of Web 2.0–driven changes do you think we need to worry about?

Spoonful of Medicine - Nature Medicine 2.0 - January 5, 2007

via Pimm - Nature Medicine 2.0 alarms by its editor in chief

Comments

[Steve Lawson]

I'm not an STM librarian, so I may not know what I'm talking about. But I would think that while it may be true that a scholar's tribe may appreciate the work regardless of how high-circulation or high-prestige the publishing journal is, I imagine that publication in a journal like Science or Nature will still be key to appreciation in a larger way--to become famous to more than just those 15 people on your buddy list.

I don't know much about Nature Medicine; perhaps it really would be caught in the middle, as not specialized enough to interest the apoptosis/mouse/liver/Stratagene gang, but too specialized to deliver a "mass" audience of scientists and doctors.