Rescaling scientific communication

Like the revolution in scientific communication that took place in the nineteenth century, today’s information revolution is driven by new technology and a sharp decrease in the costs of the distribution of scientific knowledge. Digital media and networked communications, the analogues of cheap printing and better transport infrastructure in the nineteenth century, have unleashed tremendous potential for improved and more effective communication. One of the most striking differences, however, is that the current transformation is taking place against the backdrop of an existing large and commercially highly profitable publishing industry. Coupled with an incentive system in science that places heavy emphasis on publication in established journals, the incumbent publishing system has tended to maintain the status quo at the expense of new approaches. Set against these brakes on innovation are some drivers for change, some of which find parallels with the situation two centuries ago. For example, the struggle that scientists have with the volume of information is not new. In the modern day this information comprises a vast peer-reviewed journal literature, where not only are there more articles to read but there is also a tendency for articles to contain an ever-increasing amount of data. New channels of communication dedicated to different kinds of research output have emerged to deal with the growth in the numbers of researchers and the scale and variety of the products of their work. More effective methods for sharing and using research findings mean that new audiences can be connected with scholarship, and an entirely different and very potent type of ‘reader’ is the computer itself. Computational tools are being developed that will assist, for example, with the information overload problem by helping scientists and others to navigate and interrogate the literature. Through text mining approaches, scholars could be guided towards findings that are of most interest to them. The effectiveness of such approaches is tightly linked with the extent to which the literature is freely available without limitation on reuse—the vision of open access and an important part of the revolution that is now underway. Perhaps the central challenge that needs to be addressed, however, in the context of research communication is the incentive system in science. The belief that a successful career depends on publication in specific journals, rather than on the quality of the work that is conducted, has led to a level of competition to publish in these journals that many now feel is unhealthy to the scientific enterprise, for example, by undermining the reliability and reproducibility of science. One way to tackle this concern is to reform practices of research assessment. Instead of focusing on the names of the journals in which work is published, evaluation processes