> The journal is published on PubPub, a platform developed at MIT
> that is inclusive in ways that academia and academic publishing
> frequently aren’t; PubPub is an experiment in radical
> transparency, where almost every part of the journal is open and
> editable.
> I publish a paper and then someone publishes a paper against it,”
> Slavin says. “It should be a conversation—that’s the world we live
> in.”
The platform seems like a GitHub for scientific research. A very innovative move.
This seems to be the media lab's "PubPub" platform. Interesting UI. Comments get a far greater role, presenting them on the right hand side and linking them to highlights. There's a revision history, too. Not sure who would want to read prior revisions of a blog post.
> Not sure who would want to read prior revisions of a blog post.
I've long wanted online news sites to adopt version control in published stories so that one can review what changes were made after publication. I think it would make newspapers more accountable about changing articles.
"JoDS is run very differently from a traditional academic publication. There’s no anonymized peer-review process, and there’s no fee to access its contents. “We wondered what does an academic paper look like when it’s more about the conversation, and less about tombstones,” Ito says, referring to a quote from Stewart Brand that likens formal academic publishing to burying ideas like the dead. The journal is published on PubPub, a platform developed at MIT that is inclusive in ways that academia and academic publishing frequently aren’t; PubPub is an experiment in radical transparency, where almost every part of the journal is open and editable. Readers can annotate each paper, adding comments and context to what the author wrote. The editing history is visible to everyone, so authorship is no longer an opaque attribution. Hillis’ paper has executable code that can be lifted directly from the journal."
I like the idea, but I'm a bit surprised that there doesn't seem to be a clear way of "flagging" a comment, other than downvoting it. I suppose this is an indication that I'm accustomed to some sort of moderator, but this seems like a necessary feature to have.
Come to think of it, this is actually a really annoying problem. The implication would then be that some person (or people) claiming a certain amount of responsibility for the Publication would routinely check the flag-queue. This sounds like one of those things that seems like a tiny overhead cost, but in fact is extremely annoying.
Hmm. I suppose GitHub is sort of like a model in this space, and they have not suffered too much from this problem yet. The only recourse there is to block a user, right? Perhaps people who bother using GitHub aren't malicious on average.
PubPub here. We need cleaner documentation on this - apologies for the lack of clarity.
PubPub journals (like JoDS) are no longer the publisher, but rather the curator. So, the key steps are:
1) Anybody can write and publish a document on PubPub.
2) Any document can be submitted to any journal.
3) Any journal can choose to feature a document (regardless of whether it was submitted or not).
4) Documents can be featured in unlimited journals.
So, to answer your question: yes - anybody can (publish on PubPub and then) submit to JoDS.
Curious HN behavior. I posted a link to the JODS journal and links to each of the four initial articles 10 days ago. All seemed to me to be worth the time to read, but despite intriguing titles and interesting content, they seem to have been mostly ignored. The WIRED review article, linked here, seems to garnered more interest than the real thing.
This sometimes has more to do with the day of the week and the time of day in which a piece is posted, as well as the "competition" at the given time from other viable stories.
So ironic that Jacques Mattheij's compelling piece about trackers appears immediately before this on HN right now. The linked Wired article about the Media Lab cannot be viewed if you are using an ad blocker. Bye, Wired.
No. If they think their content is pay worthy, then put it behind a paywall and see if people will pay for it. Otherwise being a false martyr for the Internet advertising model is just distasteful.
