One of the examples discussed is the use of social networking sites as a model for knowledge creation and dissemination. They discuss the affordances of platforms like facebook such as selecting the circles of audiences for different posts and the ability to receive social and instant feedback on ideas. They explore the possibility of having SNS for scientists specifically, along the lines of Academia.edu or Researchgate where scholars can post their work and the use of question functionality can generate wide discussions. They also discuss the example of Wikipedia. One of the important ways in which the wikipedia model is helpful is that anyone can contribute to a topic and that authorship can also be given to specific parts of a contribution. With the benefit of hindsight, these examples raises questions of what it means when the digital tools for collaborative authorship and publication are often owned by companies with their own policies around monetizing data and privacy clauses, and what categories of analysis should we use to analyze the affordances of these platforms in the present?
Wikis (not Wikipedia) are presented as a compromise between collaborative scientific publishing and encyclopedic initiatives: open platforms edited by a large group of users with content control by a core group (people who have accumulated trust and expertise through sustained engagement with the digital infrastructure of the wiki and the topic), where it is possible to see revisions and comments. A wiki's core group can set up style guides and protocols for workflow, and future users work in the consensus of the core group. Ideally, the core group is not static and users can become a part, revising how the wiki is designed and operated. Also, a wiki is not meant to perform original research, but curate instances of knowledge creation so a user can get a dynamic, hyper-linked overview of a "field". Saying that, the authors offer an example of a wiki that integrates functions of a peer-reviewed scientific journal: Topic Pages by PLoS Computational Biology. With a static version of an article, Topic Pages will contain reviews and reviewer identities to be included later in Wikipedia.
The authors begin by depicting the traditional path along which scholarly publications tread, critiquing such issues as the need to publish new editions and articles when new evidence is found, the lack of context for citations, and the retraction of articles/books due to scientific misconduct. The authors present the issues involved with current publications systems and how they impede on the pursuit of dynamic knowledge creation processes. They claim that the production process is not visible to the reader, that the contribution of individual authors are not visible (including honorary authorships), mistakes cannot be corrected, and scientific discourse around a publication cannot occur (or if there is discourse, those authoring the comments are not credited). There is also a high risk among authors of being accused of plagiarism for reusing certain parts of other texts, resulting in unnecessary rewording and a greater workload. This renders the question of how one might locate the new contributions to the scientific field? In addition, there are legal and technical hurdles to reusing content, despite the increased possibilities of sharing and development of dynamic publication formats with the inception of the Internet. The authors proceed to examine the positive aspects of dynamic publication formats to bring publication up to the times with the Internet’s possibilities. Dynamic publications can evolve, trace who authored which ideas/theories that led to a contribution, provide an openness via working versions of works, and allow for innovative forms of remixing and reuse. The authors depict the ways in which dynamic publishing is already being implemented, including via blogs, open peer-review processes in some journals, wikis, and stack exchange. The authors conclude by asserting that SNS for scientists may be the ideal platform to realize a dynamic publication system due to their mixture of multiple opportunities to interact and engage with other users.
Tracing the historical beginnings of academic publishing, the authors are able to clearly argue for a change in academic publishing and research dissemination. We’ve moved beyond a print era of publishing and instead of trying to force old styles of print media onto the virtual platforms, the authors argue we should use these platforms to rethink the publishing process, making it more dynamic and collaborative. Virtual platforms, in particular, can provide a more rapid feedback which has its pros and cons, and will change the way scientists collaborate with each other throughout the entire research process.