Octopus, a new vision for scientific publishing

science.org

1 pointbeckman4661 comment

"There is a real problem in science—with widespread questionable research practices [...] I think that the root of it all is the publication system, and the pressure to publish as the only way that scientists are being judged. The new publishing platform I envisage would stop forcing researchers to try to tell a story, allowing them to concentrate on doing their work to the best of their ability and on constructively collaborating.
Q: How would this new publication system work?
A: The overall idea behind the new platform, which I called Octopus, is to break the standard unit of publication up into eight smaller stages or pieces. These include formulated scientific problems, hypotheses, methods and protocols, data, analysis, interpretation, and real-world applications. The eighth piece is reviews where people share their comments about the other stages, but it's also treated as a publication itself because it is a constructive piece of collaboration. [...]

The formulated scientific problem automatically becomes the beginning of a chain, and all the other pieces are vertically linked upward. If you have a great hypothesis, you can publish that and link it straight up to the problem that it is trying to address. And if you've collected some small amount of data, you can publish that, linking it directly up to the protocol that you followed. It will also be possible to create horizontal links between publications; maybe somebody has come up with an amazing algorithm whilst studying starling flocking behavior and somebody else working on oil pipelines has decided to use it."

The article also links to Dr. Alexandra Freeman's Octopus pitch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAY9s-CUQKE&t=20806s

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