Good read! I wish to clarify that registration, certification, archiving, and dissemination (or awareness) as core activities of Journals and Scholarly Communication in general have been discussed for a long time, at least since Kircz, Joost G., and Hans E. Roosendaal. 1996. ‘Understanding and Shaping Scientific Information Transfer’.
A colleague and I recently shared a preprint on SocArXiv about the way the WWW and the digitisation of information have changed how these activities are performed. This post seems to foresee how certification will further change due to technological and social innovation. I still have to make up my mind on whether I like this possible change or not.
I thoroughly enjoyed this, Mark. The publishing community has been pondering this question for as long as I can remember and perhaps we're now at an inflection point. However, let's not forget that humans are story-telling machines. We've been telling stories to each other for millennia. Will we be OK with outsourcing narratives about research projects to machines? What will we have lost if that happens? You've outlined the upsides cogently. What are the downsides?
I agree! I think there's also a lot of merit in researchers putting their name on their interpretation of the findings. I think humans will be better at being question machines for a long time. Why does this happen, why did that happen? I think this in addition to researcher papers could speed us up and add layers of research integrity we're currently lacking
Hi, fellow academic and Open Science representative of the Faculty of Humanities at Leiden University here 👋 I really enjoyed reading this piece! Looking forward to engaging with more of your writing.
And a side note: I have an unpublished draft titled “Are There ANY Ethical Uses of AI for Academic Work” trying to reply to those arguing for complete refusal with examples from sharing datasets — how tedious, unrewarding, and, frankly, super boring this work can be. I haven’t made my mind around publishing it yet because I’m not pro AI and I’m a bit terrified of the reactions. In any case, thanks again!
Good read! I wish to clarify that registration, certification, archiving, and dissemination (or awareness) as core activities of Journals and Scholarly Communication in general have been discussed for a long time, at least since Kircz, Joost G., and Hans E. Roosendaal. 1996. ‘Understanding and Shaping Scientific Information Transfer’.
A colleague and I recently shared a preprint on SocArXiv about the way the WWW and the digitisation of information have changed how these activities are performed. This post seems to foresee how certification will further change due to technological and social innovation. I still have to make up my mind on whether I like this possible change or not.
I thoroughly enjoyed this, Mark. The publishing community has been pondering this question for as long as I can remember and perhaps we're now at an inflection point. However, let's not forget that humans are story-telling machines. We've been telling stories to each other for millennia. Will we be OK with outsourcing narratives about research projects to machines? What will we have lost if that happens? You've outlined the upsides cogently. What are the downsides?
I agree! I think there's also a lot of merit in researchers putting their name on their interpretation of the findings. I think humans will be better at being question machines for a long time. Why does this happen, why did that happen? I think this in addition to researcher papers could speed us up and add layers of research integrity we're currently lacking
Hi, fellow academic and Open Science representative of the Faculty of Humanities at Leiden University here 👋 I really enjoyed reading this piece! Looking forward to engaging with more of your writing.
And a side note: I have an unpublished draft titled “Are There ANY Ethical Uses of AI for Academic Work” trying to reply to those arguing for complete refusal with examples from sharing datasets — how tedious, unrewarding, and, frankly, super boring this work can be. I haven’t made my mind around publishing it yet because I’m not pro AI and I’m a bit terrified of the reactions. In any case, thanks again!
Love this.