The core of my frustration with #OpenScience practices:
We cannot have a true Open Science until we dispel the myth that papers contain usable descriptions of scientific processes.
This cannot happen until researchers are trained, using evidence-based pedagogy, to read scientific articles for USE, not citation, not argument support, but USE!!!
In my seminars, all learners leave convinced we need a documentation system grounded in usability, & that papers are NOT fit for purpose. >>
This happens by positioning researchers as users of scientific information, instead of as producers. Instead of focusing on putting a paper out, researchers begin to see what information they need from others, and what information others need from them, to apply & use knowledge.
This simple, yet indispensable mind-shift, is crucial to creating and strengthening scientific knowledge creation networks where that knowledge is reconcieved as part of the commons, ergo, a true #OpenScience >>
This means the goal of my work on teaching to read scientific journal articles is NOT to rescue them, but to guide researchers in seeing with their own eyes, through their own experience, that we need to:
1. get rid of papers
2. create usable scientific documentation systems grounded in how human minds work and understand information.
@aeryn_thrace The fact that papers are used to measure researchers against each other for career advancement seems like a big obstacle to the necessary changes you describe, unfortunately.
I agree with you that an actionable and collective "knowledge system" is better than a pile of PDFs, but a bigger reform of how academia functions might be required first.
@Guillawme No doubt it's required.
2 points about the current system:
1. It hasn't been around for that long. It's easy to thing that this is the way things have always been but they haven't. I went to school with people who got tenure track positions with one paper (early 2000s).
2. It's not sustainable, and is already showing cracks: exponential growth of predatory publishers and A.I. generated papers. And that's not even considering the reproducibility crisis. >>
Researchers are public servants, and our service is to create usable knowledge. We can't keep publishing extremely expensive papers that are virtually unusable without contact with the original authors without expecting the societies funding us to not notice.
Monica Gonzalez-Marquez
Guillaume Gaullier