Michael Rowe

Trying to get better at getting better

Can LinkedIn and Academia.edu enhance access to open repositories? | Impact of Social Sciences: “The paper explores other possible reasons for the high visibility of these papers – and one possibility worthy of further investigation is the provision of many papers in HTML formats and not just PDF and MS Word. “

I don’t understand why it’s taking so long for journals to consider the vast possibilities afforded by a move from PDF to HTML as the format for research presentation. And I don’t just mean displaying the PDF as a web page. Journals can’t seem to move away from the idea that a paper should be presented as if it were actual paper, with all the constraints of that format.

We should be able to embed video (e.g. processes), audio (e.g. participant or author interviews) and external links (e.g. relevant blog posts as commentary) in the document, as well as provide access to the raw data in ways that make it easy to export. We could have commenting on and within papers, as a form of “after-the-fact” peer review.

We talk about publishing as a way of contributing to an academic conversation, but journals don’t allow readers to really engage with author/s, other than providing us with an email address. I was excited when I read about the “Article of the future” in 2010, but I’ve been disappointed with the lack of innovation from journals since then.


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