Matters Journal - sciencematters.io

raw 2016-01-03 06:52:00 UTC #1

This is really cool - I've been thinking a lot about this lately and I'm really glad to know someone beat me to it:

The idea is that you publish single observations, rapidly, via "triple-blind peer review". It is definitely time to get scientific communication out of the printing press era. This seems like a step in the right direction, and reminds me of a Michael Nielsen article.

At $150/$300 per observation, will people use it? Will it help them get tenure? What about their h-index ? Again, has me thinking about Nielsen's concept of the 'economics of expert attention'.

Anyone tried this out?

cflow 2016-01-07 22:46:07 UTC #2

I think this is a cool idea, and possibly something I'd pursue. I have a few thoughts:

It needs the support of those providing 'career valuation' in order to be a useful platform for early career scientists. If it's publish here or hold out for a paper to put in my tenure packet, unless this is valued as highly as an independent submission I think most young faculty would take the safe route.
There's promise for short-term project findings to get shared here, e.g. summer undergraduate student solo projects, course investigations, etc. That also requires financial support from the instructor/department/advisor in most cases.
A few key observations published in any given field could rapidly give this a lot of sustained attention.

Thanks for sharing, I'll definitely keep an eye on this.

Aditya 2016-01-08 00:55:35 UTC #3

This is a great idea. I believe that unless proprietary, all completed scientific experiments and observations should be available for perusal even if they do not fit into a comprehensive narrative. This is a good first step.

With communication 3 figure articles becoming more and more prevalent, I think that 1 figure single page articles based on single observations will catch on as well.

raw 2016-01-08 17:20:48 UTC #4

i definitely agree with @cflow that it would only take one sub-field to decide this is the journal of choice to really help this take off. for example, the graphene & optomechanics guys all publish on arxiv first even though much of other applied physics never goes there. it's all cultural.