Science

Transforming the way we publish research

• Inspirational
• Ingenious
• Rockin’

“Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose.” Vannevar Bush, 1945

"Science is already a wiki if you look at it a certain way. It’s just a highly inefficient one — the incremental edits are made in papers instead of wikispace, and significant effort is expended to recapitulate existing knowledge in a paper in order to support the one to three new assertions made in any one paper." — John Wilbanks, 2009

"So, we had the idea that you do your systematic review before you do your research; you do your research, and then if you haven't changed much, you haven't really made a big impact, whereas if you've actually shifted things one way or the other and made it more precise then you have." — Elizabeth Wager, 2010

What are we aiming for?
We want to change the way research is communicated, both amongst researchers, as well as with health practitioners, patients and the wider public. Inspired by Beethoven, we want to build a research version of his repository and try to tackle the question "What if the public scientific record would be updated directly as research proceeds?"

Why would this be useful?
Every year, over 1 million scholarly articles are being published in around 25,000 journals. No researcher - let alone the public - can keep track of all the relevant information any more, not even in small fields. To make things worse, only about 20% of these articles are freely accessible in one way or another, but the majority is not. Our project aims at providing a technically feasible solution: open-access articles that evolve along with the topic they cover.

This would allow researchers, research funders and the public to stay up to date with research in their fields of interest. It would save researchers time because when they write their results up, they could make use of the context provided by the existing articles, and outreach would be built in from the beginning, rather than being perceived as an extra burden that comes after a traditional publication. It would also save funders time because monitoring research progress would amount to checking the change logs of the respective articles. It would also save patients time, especially when a disease makes their clocks tick faster. Last but not least, it would open the doors for science as a spectator sport, and allow for enhanced interaction between citizen science and more traditional approaches to research.

How do we plan to get there?
There are already over 100,000 scholarly articles available online under a Creative Commons Attribution License and thus free for anyone to read, download, copy, distribute, modify and build upon, provided that proper attribution is given. We will start building Beethoven's open repository by taking 10,000 of these (especially review articles), convert them into a common format, interlink them like topics are linked on Wikipedia, and update them with fresh information as new research findings become available. This will turn the original 10,000 articles into Evolving Review Articles - in other contexts called Living Reviews - available under that same Creative Commons license. We expect that this will help research to be communicated faster, with the ability to promptly correct errors or misconceptions, and in a way that better incorporates the interests of the public. The Evolving Reviews will have a public version history, so that anyone can see in what state the article was at any given time in the past. Over time, this feature can develop into an important tool for exploring the history of science, or of ideas more generally.

The project is intended as a proof of principle, so we do not plan to update all of these Evolving Reviews ourselves, nor all those that come in during the project's duration of one year. Instead, we will focus on a subset, and you will have a voice in selecting the topics on which we will try this new approach. The other set of topics that we will concentrate on is that for which research projects already exist that are being conducted in public (which makes them especially suited to the Evolving Review approach) or for which patient advocacy groups exist that strongly support open approaches to research. Finally, we will give anyone the possibility to update the reviews in their fields of interest. All changes will be curated, and the Evolving Reviews can then be fed back to other open knowledge and open education projects.

For further details on the project, please see its project page at Wikiversity - anyone can edit it or post questions and comments there too.

What do we need to get there?
We need experience with both research and collaborative online platforms, and luckily we already have that. We also need quite a bit of software development - as mentioned in the video, we think that Beethoven's open repository of research should be federated rather than centralized. This means that if you edit a page in the repository, this act will create a personal copy for you. You can decide whether you want to feed these changes back to others, they can decide whether they accept your changes, and there must be options for authorizing certain versions for certain purposes. Such federated systems for the collaborative structuring of knowledge are only just emerging, and producing a working prototype platform that allows anyone to contribute to Beethoven's open repository is an important milestone in our project. Once the platform is up and running, the 10,000 seed articles will have to be imported, and a selection of them will be used to demo the Evolving Review concept. You can help shape the project by making suggestions as to what topics we should concentrate on. Finally, we want to facilitate the reuse of the Evolving Reviews in contexts outside research, especially in education and in supporting patients.

How will the SciFund budget be used?
We estimate that about half of the project's budget will be used to write the software for the prototype and to ensure hosting, maintenance and other technical background work. About one fourth of the budget will be spent on editorial work on the site - to identify knowledge gaps in the target articles and to update them as new research comes in. The remaining fourth of the budget is foreseen for producing educational materials on the basis of the Evolving Reviews.

Supposing we reach our goal, what next?
When this prototype project ends after one year, there will be a set of Evolving Reviews that have kept all interested parties up-to-date on the state of research in the respective fields, and if this was to their liking, we will attempt to turn the project into something more permanent. This way, the Evolving Reviews can serve as the basis for future research proposals (because the gaps of knowledge would be easily identifiable) as well as for educational materials (because the process of knowledge generation is much more visible in Beethoven's repository than in the current flood of articles spread across a large number of journals) and probably a number of other activities (some that we thought of are digital museum collections; your suggestions are welcome) and translations into other languages. We could also think of collaborating with other open knowledge projects (e.g. the freshly launched UNESCO Open Educational Resources Platform) to apply and adapt the Evolving Review approach to their materials.

Copyright notice
The text of this project is available under a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication. 

Supplementary materials
Like many scholarly articles nowadays, the text of this proposal is supplemented by a number of files that highlight certain aspects of it.

Images:
(Left) A wiki version of Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, by Alasdair Forrest. What if the public scientific record would be updated directly as research proceeds? Published under a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication.
(Center) The web of science. Dots represent scientific journals, lines indicate a certain degree of relatedness. In our implementation of Beethoven's repository, the dots would be individual topics, and you coud use such a map to navigate scientific knowledge. Source: Fig. 5 of Bollen J, Van de Sompel H, Hagberg A, Bettencourt L, Chute R, et al. (2009) Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science. PLoS ONE 4(3): e4803. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0004803. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution License.
(Right) White-crowned sparrows follow the migratory route indicated by the yellow arrow along the coast of North America. If research about their sleeping behaviour during migration has already been published in a way that allows for updates, wouldn't it be useful to add new research right in there rather than in separate articles published in different journals, and possibly not even accessible ones? Source: PLoS Biology Issue Image | Vol. 2(7) July 2004. PLoS Biol 2(7): ev02.i07. doi:10.1371/image.pbio.v02.i07. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Audio file: The complete first set of Beethoven's Sonata No. 22 in F Major, Op. 54, as available from Musopen - an implementation of Beethoven's repository for music (though they use a slightly different translation of Beethoven's German original) - under a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication. The part that we used for the video starts at about 1 min into the file.