MIT Media Lab’s Journal of Design and Science Is a New Kind of Publication

Quotes from the article:

    > 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.

http://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/ here's the link to the journal itself if anyone is interested

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.

See: http://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/design-as-participation

It's good to see a slick blog site to accompany their publication.

This is really interesting:

"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.

Can anyone submit to JoDS? I see there are only five papers listed on the homepage: http://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/

I'm kind of curious what sort of publications they would like and what they would turn down.

This pubpub platforms seems really great..how can I deploy me own?

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.

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.