Friday, January 20, 2012

Mass-Market Scholarly Communication Revisted

The very first post to this blog in 2007 was entitled "Mass-Market Scholarly Communication". Its main point was:
Blogs are bringing the tools of scholarly communication to the mass market, and with the leverage the mass market gives the technology, may well overwhelm the traditional forms.
Now, Annotum: An open-source authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress is proving me a prophet.

It was developed based on experience with PLOS Currents, a rapid publishing journal hosted at Google. After a detailed review of the alternatives, the developers decided to implement Annotum as a WordPress theme providing the capabilities needed for journal publishing, such as multiple authors, strict adherence to JATS (the successor to the NLM DTD), tables, figures, equations, references and review. The leverage of mass-market publishing technology is considerable. The paper describing Annotum is well worth a read.

2 comments:

David. said...

It is also worth noting the proposal for an improved model of scholarly publishing in Toward a new model of scientific publishing: discussion and a proposal by Dwight J. Kravitz and Chris I. Baker and in particular the excellent analysis of the publication process underlying it. Their proposal features rapid publishing, minimal pre-publication review, PLoS ONE-like acceptance, and rewards for high-quality reviewing. Their proposal has similarities to the recently announced F1000 Research from the Faculty of 1000, which additionally stresses open access to both text and data under Creative Commons licenses, and freedom to move away from the traditional article structure.

David. said...

Oops, the link to the Kravitz & Baker paper in the comment above seems to be broken. Here is the DOI link and the link to the abstract in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience.