‘Evolving manuscripts’: the future of scientific communication?

I just have read a very interesting post in THE (Times Higher Education) about 'Evolving manuscripts' a new concept that could be the future of scientific comunication, where scientists may communicate their results through “evolving manuscripts” a kind of paper that are updated continually over a working life.

In this way, a researcher may have only two or three publications throughout his career, Thus , a publication can have multiple versions as as the area of research develops.

This idea was exposed by Sir Mark at the second part of the Royal Society’s 'Future of Scholarly Scientific Communication conference', held in London on 5-6 May.

His idea would help to mitigate “perverse incentives” in the current system, he said. These include a bias against publishing negative results or those that confirm or confound existing research, as well as the pressures that scientists face to split a piece of work into multiple articles.

An “evolving manuscript” would begin with a pre-publication, pre-peer review “beta 0.9” version of an article, followed by the approved published article itself, which Sir Mark dubs “version 1.0”.

I think it is a simple yet revolutionary concept that can change once the academic and research scenario and make it better suited to the stage that we face in this century full of new challenges.

You can read full post (with a very striking photo)  here. :-)