[repos]

Scientific publications/journals are highly ineffective, but what is the alternative? The current system is so entrenched in the politics of science - you need publications in respectable journals to advance your career or to get grants.

It's going to be very difficult to break.

[araneae]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Library_of_Science

It's difficult, but it's already working. PLoS journals are actually quite reputable, currently.

[jessriedel]

Yep. The New Journal of Physics has a lame name, but it has a 3.31 impact factor (high for physics) and all published papers are available for free in PDF and, impressively, HTML.

[tybris]

I don't disapprove of free and open publication, but without publishers, who is going to organize conferences with gala luncheons?

[Zak]

I think some sort of academic graph system could be a suitable replacement. Individual users could "like" papers they thought were worth reading and other users could "follow" them to have those recommendations factored in to their reading lists.

[Produce]

I've got an idea about this in the concept phase. Think OSS meets science.

[nightski]

Don't think this will work out as well. Not only can you get paid to do OSS, but we (programmers) also have the option of obtaining very high paying jobs while working on OSS projects on the side. Not only this, but lots of research requires quite a bit more expensive equipment than writing software. I mean I would love to see something like this work but I have my doubts :)

[Produce]

I'm not looking to profit from this so I'll give you a brief summary of the concept.

Essentially, the idea is to remove, or at the least, decrease, political influence over science. The problem right now is that very few scientists can research things which actually interest them. Often, they are working for a company which is attempting to make more money, or the military, which is attempting to kill more people, or academia, where the idea is to get the most prestige. All of those things directly decrease the quality of research and have no place in science.

As a scientist, I could go onto this site, write up a hypothesis and outline the experiment that needs to be performed to test it. Then, people who have an interest in the particular piece of research could provide funding, loan equipment or even directly contribute by becoming part of the team. After the experiment has been completed, the results are released in the public domain (this also helps to break up the monopoly that scientific publication have). Crowd sourcing is then utilised to verify the findings and discuss their implications.

To put it another way, science should be something that everyone can do, given enough free time and determination, yet, as things are, only a select few get to do this and often have to deal with mountains of politics to get to that stage.

[repos]

Is software the issue? I think the problem is that the only way to get your science out to other scientists is through journals. Yeah journals filter the good research from the bad, but there has to be a better way. The review process itself isn't even great.

A better system would also allow for the release of negative data.