End of Publication? Open access and a new scholarly communication technology

TL;DR

This paper explores how new micro research outputs and linking tools enable pre-publication scholarly communication, potentially transforming traditional publication practices, increasing transparency, and impacting open access, peer review, and research assessment.

Contribution

It discusses the potential impact of pre-publication communication tools on research practices and proposes experiments to explore these effects in the scholarly community.

Findings

Pre-publication communication can increase transparency in research.

Tools for micro research outputs enable direct researcher interactions.

Potential to transform traditional publication and peer review systems.

Abstract

At this time, developers of research information systems are experimenting with new tools for research outputs usage that can expand the open access to research. These tools allow researchers to record research as annotations, nanopublications or other micro research outputs and link them by scientific relationships. If these micro outputs and relationships are shared by their creators publicly, these actions can initiate direct scholarly communication between the creators and the authors of the used research outputs. Such direct communication takes place while researchers are manipulating and organising their research results, e.g. as manuscripts. Thus, researchers come to communication before the manuscripts become traditional publications. In this paper, we discuss how this pre-publication communication can affect existing research practice. It can have important consequences for the research community like the end of publication as a communication instrument, the higher level of transparency in research, changes for the Open Access movement, academic publishers, peer-reviewing and research assessment systems. We analyse a background that exists in the economics discipline for experiments with the pre-publication communication. We propose a set of experiments with already existed and new tools, which can help with exploring the end of publication possible impacts on the research community.