Liquid Journal
The scenario in which current scientific research is undertaken has greatly changed since the days printed journals, letters, and conference talks were the only form of scientific knowledge dissemination. In those days, the scarce and expensive resource was the printing and distribution of papers. Publishing was expensive. As a result, there was a need to screen contributions before they got published, and there was no other means to do this than peer review. Besides the unavoidable time delays, the process was the only reasonable one, and it was feasible as the research community was relatively small and the reviewing effort was low. Printing and distribution also means that the journal had to be organized in volumes and issues, available periodically.
The Web has changed the way we create, consume and disseminate scientific knowledge. Publishing is now almost real time and free and papers are not longer the only form of scientific dissemination. We can now publish early ideas in blogs, put pre-prints in online repositories, experiments and slides in our homepage; and so a variety of new types of contributions, valuable form the research perspective, are now available. In this context, publishing and having access to contributions is not a problem but the information overhead. In other words, the problem for authors is not longer publishing but making their work visible and for readers getting interesting and relevant scientific content.
Surprisingly, academic journals, which have traditionally played the role of content filters, follow essentially the same approach as before the Web: traditional notion of papers, issues and volumes, peer review for quality assessment, etc. As we mentioned, the reason behind this model is historical as the only way of disseminating was via printed materials. Now that we are free from this constraint, it is time to look for a model that fits the new context.
We propose a notion of liquid and personal journals that evolve continuously in time and that are targeted to serve individuals or communities of arbitrarily small or large scales. The liquid journals provide “interesting” content, in the form of “scientific contributions” that are “related” to a certain paper, topic, or area, and that are posted (on their web site, repositories, traditional journals) by “inspiring” researchers. As such, the liquid journal separates the notion of “publishing” (which can be achieved by just posting content on the Web) from the appearance of contributions into the journals, which are essentially collections of content.
In this research area we are trying to understand:
- What are scientific contributions and how to characterize them
- What are "interestingness" and "relevance" and how we can measure them
- How to assess other aspects of research activity, such as good selector, having good ideas, good reviewer, etc.
- How to motivate people to share scientific content
- How to reuse and combine scientific services
Documents
Liquid Journals: Knowledge Dissemination in the Web Era Marcos Baez, Fabio Casati.
Liquid Journals: Overcoming Information Overload in the Scientific Community Marcos Baez, Aliaksandr Birukou, Fabio Casati, Maurizio Marchese and Daniil Mirylenka
Liquid Journals - Intro and RoadMap Liquid Journals. Overview. How social computing and liquid knowledge will shape and navigate information waters 
Tools
Information about the prototype we are developing is available at LiquidPub wiki. Please visit this link to try it out, help us with testing and development.
Videos
Below, we illustrate some basic features we envision for the first version of LJ. In the near future we will replace these mockups with the real application. Please, stay tuned!
Related Work
- Smith, J. W. T. (2000). The deconstructed journal – a new model for academic publishing. Learned Publishing, 12, 79-91.
- Pinfield, S (2009). Journals and repositories: an evolving relationship? Learned Publishing, Volume 22, Number 3, July 2009 , pp. 165-175(11)
- Moyle, M. and Lewis, A. (2008) RIOJA (Repository Interface to Overlaid Journal Archives) project: final report. Research report. UCL (University College London), London, UK.
