- Instant distribution. Right now there is a 12 month time-lag between submitting a paper to a journal, and the paper being published. We need to remove that time-lag and introduce instant distribution of scientific ideas.
- Better peer review. Right now the peer review process takes 12 months to complete, and only surfaces the opinions of two academics - academics who may be biased, uninformed about the subject area, or just in a bad mood when writing the review. 2 people is too small a sample size. We need a faster and more robust peer review system, one that surfaces the opinions of the entire scientific community, and in real-time.
- Multi-media. Right now, scientists only share papers in PDF form. We need to bring about a science where scientists are incentivized to share data-sets, code, videos, blog posts, and comments on all these media. Right now a lot of the world’s scientific output does not get shared, because the system of credibility metrics only rewards one kind of format, the paper. We need to change this.
- Open access. We need to bring about a world where a villager in India has the same access to the world’s scientific output as a professor in Harvard. When you open up access to the world’s scientific literature to the 2.5 billion people who are online right now, magical things may happen.
Critical to achieving change in science is understanding how the reputation system works. Competition for funding is intense, and scientists optimize for the kinds of reputation metrics that the funding bodies and hiring committees check for. To achieve instant distribution, better peer review, multi-media sharing, and open sharing, one has to build reputation metrics that encourage that kind of activity.
Historically the main reputation metric in science has been the journal title. But over the last 4-5 years, new reputation metrics have emerged in science. Google Scholar pioneered the citation count: it released the count of how many inbound citations your work has received, and scientists started to take that metric and say to their funding committees 'this metric reflects well on me; I would like you to take it into account when evaluating my work'.
Academia.edu has been pioneering the introduction of usage metrics: page view counts for your papers. Our users regularly take screenshots of their Analytics Dashboard on Academia.edu and submit them to their tenure committees and funding bodies. There is a good case of someone including their Academia.edu Analytics in their application for tenure here http://blog.academia.edu/post/23302130233/user-spotlight-tim....
In the future there will be a family of reputation metrics in science, each reflecting a different aspect of impact.
If you are excited about building this future of science, we are looking for passionate people to join us. More about the company is here http://academia.edu/hiring. Send me an email at richard[at]academia.edu if you would like to chat further.