A Solution for Scientific Publishing?

Is there a better model for scientific publishing?
There are two major current problems: the cost of publishing and access, and the inequities of the peer review process. Both could be cured at once.

We need ONLY ONE, publicly-run, open-access scientific publishing domain to which ALL ARTICLES are uploaded for free, in whatever format wished for by the authors and without prior peer review. This domain would subsume all existing primary research publishing. After an initial, publically-funded development phase, the small costs of maintaining this domain could be obtained through discreet advertising revenues. The model thus obviates both the need for  charging huge amounts for access to  journals and the need to charge authors for each publication submitted.

Once an article is uploaded it will easily be able to be found by a keyword search, such as exists in PubMed or Web of Science. Reviewing would not be solicited but would be open and online, in the fashion of "comments" to a blog entry.  Any given article might thus receive many or no reviews. No reviews would be anonymous: only registered reviewers who have revealed their identities would be allowed to post comments. Many of the reviews are likely to be incompetent, but the reviews would also be open to review, and ranking, as would the reviews of the reviews etc..

In the above system there would be no need for a decision to be made a priori as to whether an article is "of sufficient general interest" before publication - this would all be decided by the readers afterwards: a points system could be devised whereby an article gains prominence depending on how many times it is accessed from different computers, cited later on, and on the reviews received. As an article rises in points, so would its visibility in the web domain. Extremely hot articles would be expected to very rapidly gain prominence.

Any objections?

Up the City!

Well, I've kept my trap shut concerning Norwich City since the unlikely day of their ascension to the Premier League. Why? Because it has all been too much, too nerve-wracking, despairing, elating, rousing, deflating and inspiring.

We didn't belong here, you see. At the beginning of the campaign we were 8/11 favourites to go straight back down. After all, everyone knows that to shine in the world's most-watched arena you had better avail yourself of a $200M team of silky, experienced, speedy World-Cup Ghanaians, Brazilians and Ukrainians, not a cut-price gaggle of crass, verdant British amateurs uprooted from the lower leagues.

But today we beat Tottenham Hotspurs 2-1 away. Our little team of country yokels stauched the supposedly unstoppable flow of flair and brilliance in London - the vaunted Spurs: Adebayor, Modric, and Gareth Bale, the last of those men himself alone valued at three times the cost of the whole Norwich team. And we didn't simply score 2 to their 1, we robbed them everywhere on the pitch. Throughout the whole match we were first to the ball then quicker thinking when we had it.

Paul Lambert, the gaffer, has mixed in some systematics he learned with Borussia Dortmund in Germany. But perhaps more tellingly he has assembled a kit of hungry lads. Football mirrors life: you can have whatever pedigree you like, whatever past successes, whatever mega-salary, whatever fame, but if, like Spurs, you lose that edge, that hunger, that raw desire and intent, you will lose the game.

And now we're safe, more than safe, we're even perusing a top-half finish, and I can finally breathe, relax, pour a glass of red and enjoy the Summer.

Party Time!

Of course neutron scattering, NMR spectroscopy and MRI imaging are no fun.

Boring medical scans never put a smile on anyone's face, did they?

Party balloons are what put people in the right mood.

All those lovely balloons that just go up, up, up and away?

They're filled with helium, of course.

But because in 1996 Congress vowed to sell off the U.S.'s large helium stockpile by 2015, the price of helium has been kept artificially low even as the demand for the gas has soared, and many a party balloon has been perked up as a result.

And now there's hardly any helium left.

So we'll have to stop detecting neutrons, cooling samples down, doing MRI scans, determining molecular structures etc.

All the more time to spend having parties, don't you think?

Golden Eagles in Tennessee and Scotland

Good to read in the Knoxville News Sentinel that Golden Eagles may be soaring above the East Tennessee mountains somewhat more frequently these days. I remember them from the 1980s in North-West Scotland, where my father and his wife lived, in a place called Achnanellan, on the banks of Loch Shiel. Achnanellan is hidden in the wilderness, an old 17th century croft house with no road (you have to cross the Loch to get to it) and no neighbours within 4 miles. A place of ferocious weather and swarms of midges, of rich lichen and peat.

Here it is - the croft is a tiny white speck in the middle:

Achnanellan means "Field Near the Island", the island being St. Finnan's Isle, a windswept ancient burial ground. I set foot on it, and wondered at the dour, very old crosses (below). The locals had divided half of it for Protestants and half for Catholics, and placed pennies in the trees as votive offerings. There was maybe one burial per year there in the 1980s, probably many more before the brutal Highland clearances. The old bronze bell in the ruined chapel was still there, rumored to be a thousand years old - no-one had stolen it.

As for the eagles, they were always far above our heads, 1000 ft or so, hunting rabbits with acuity from on high. They fly in monogamous pairs and look like flying planks. It was difficult to fully appreciate their 7-foot wingspan from that distance, but pictures of one digging its talons into a cameraman truly bring home their size and power. Achnanellan, St. Finnan's Isle and Loch Shiel belonged to the eagles.

The DOE:Industry Supercomputing Summit.....

.....in Austin TX, from which I just came back, brought together Industrial R&D and National Lab research directors. Secretary Chu gave an entertaining talk on three hours of sleep describing how computations on DOE facilities have led to potentially commercially important new designs of trucks, buildings etc and I had the pleasure of sitting next to the CEO of Ramgen, a company that has used the supercomputer to design a new, efficient jet engine. Only complaint is the usual one - the quality of the breakfasts, which seems to have been downgraded since the "Scientists Gone Wild" news report some years ago....

A Success in Structure-Based Drug Design

News reports today state that vermurafenib, an oncogenic B-RAF kinase inhibitor, doubles the length of survival on average of those 50% of metastatic melanoma patients that possess the relevant mutation. This is a success for drug design guided by principles of protein structure, as the drug was discovered by examining interactions of candidates within the binding pocket of the enzyme.

Molecular biophysics in the service of medicine! Hopefully the structure-based screening work will soon be able to be effectively done virtually. At least, thats what we and many others are working on.....

Campus Paris-Saclay

Of course, I like to follow what happens to places where I used to work and live. One of these was the Plateau de Saclay, and this, it seems has just been selected for gargantuan funding under IDEX-2.

IDEX appears to be the French version of the "Exzellenzinitiative" in Germany, in which I partook six years ago. This came when Germany recognized that having a couple of universities in the top twenty would do wonders for its image, so the Minister concerned suggested creating a Teutonic MIT. Now you can't just do this, because it takes a lot of dosh, and putting all that money in one place wasn't politically viable (too few would benefit and the rest would lose), so it was diluted a bit, and instead gave a useful but, in my opinion, indecisive helping hand to the top 10-15 universities. (A minuscule fraction of the Heidelberg funding went to paying part of my visits there over the last 5 years).

Now, it appears, the French are thinking likewise, and with massive amounts of dough (about $10bn). Now this goes against the mores of the egalitarian France I used to know that would fund individual CNRS researchers with small salaries, no equipment and give them complete freedom for life with no accountability. But even France, it seems, can't abide languishing way down in the Shanghai rankings, and so it is that there will be the haves and have-nots. Paris-Saclay is a big 'have' and will be drinking champagne. Grenoble, another candidate, and where I did my Ph.D., lost out, so they will have to hit the whisky.

Paris-Saclay: Le Campus Aujourd'hui

Le Campus Demain