{"id":2623,"date":"2011-05-16T15:30:00","date_gmt":"2011-05-16T15:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/msr_er\/2011\/05\/16\/paradigm-shifting-in-scholarly-communications\/"},"modified":"2016-07-20T07:33:54","modified_gmt":"2016-07-20T14:33:54","slug":"paradigm-shifting-in-scholarly-communications","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/blog\/paradigm-shifting-in-scholarly-communications\/","title":{"rendered":"Paradigm Shifting in Scholarly Communications"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this year, Lee Dirks, Cheri Ekholm, and I attended Phil Bourne’s Beyond the PDF workshop<\/span> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> at the University of California, San Diego. This workshop advanced the premise that scholarly communication can and should evolve from static and disparate data and knowledge representation, as embodied in today’s typical PDF representations of research papers, to a rich integrated content which grows and changes the more we learn. In the few months since this event, there’s been a great deal of activity: Martin Fenner and Mark Hahnel are working on WordPress for Scientists<\/span> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>, Peter Sefton has launched the Scholarly HTML<\/span> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> effort, and our team here at Microsoft Research is hard at work on some great new features for our next release of the Article Authoring Add-in for Word<\/span> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> (the beta release of version 3.0 is due this later this year). <\/span><\/p>\n

But even more important than developing tools or formats, we need to persuade the current generation of researchers to challenge the status quo. Scholars do see the value (to varying degrees) in sharing a greater level of detail of their research as a part of the scholarly communication process, recognizing that such communications enhance the scientific record and accelerate discovery. But active researchers are also players in a system that rewards the traditional research paper format to the exclusion of all else. <\/span><\/p>\n

A major thread in this conversation stresses the enormous potential of shared research data in facilitating experimental reproducibility and validation. Much ink has been spent in the past few years on the “data deluge” and the promise of new advances in science that are not based on the traditional hypothesis-experiment-analysis-conclusion paradigm, but rather start with previously unseen patterns, anomalies, or correlations within the existing wealth of collected data themselves as the catalyst for new investigations and experiments.     <\/span><\/p>\n

To this end, it is clear that the sharing of scientific research data holds great promise for the scientific discoveries of the future. And yet the system of academic research achievement does not yet recognize or reward researchers for sharing their data. Change is afoot, however, and the next generation will look back on this decade as one of profound transformation in determining which parts of the scientific research process are recorded and how researchers are rewarded. <\/span><\/p>\n

In the meantime, organizations like BioMed Central<\/span> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> are stepping up to recognize those researchers who are on the vanguard of this movement. Microsoft Research has contributed to BioMed Central’s Research Awards<\/span> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> for several years, and we are proud sponsors of the Open Data Award<\/span> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> since its inception in 2010. This year’s award recognized biologist Tommi Nyman from Finland for the article, “How common is ecological speciation in plant-feeding insects? A ‘Higher’ Nematinae perspective<\/span> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>,” published in the open-access journal, BMC Evolutionary Biology<\/span><\/i> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>. <\/span><\/p>\n

\"Dr. (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>
Dr. Peter Murray-Rust (left); Jean-Luc Bouvé (center), accepting the Open Data Award <\/span>
on behalf of Dr. Tommi Nyman; and Alex Wade (right) <\/span><\/p>\n

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Dr. Nyman and his colleagues published three additional data files with their article: <\/span><\/p>\n