Science and medical journals are so 20th century.
The Internet changes everything, they say. Well, maybe not everything, yet. The number of articles in medical and scientific periodicals is still fundamentally a product of the number of paper pages funded by the publishing entity. And subscription-only access has proven to be virtually unyielding, despite the leadership of open-access pioneers BMJ, JMIR, Medscape, BioMedCentral, PubMedCentral, and PLoS. The much criticized peer-review system remains virtually intact since its adoption in medical journals in the 18th century.
But now, mature Internet technologies coupled with exploding genomic data may lead to inexorable transformation in scientific publishing, parallel to the change that is rocking biomedical disciplines themselves. Young companies are challenging publishing giants, providing innovative ways of measuring an article’s import, filtering, and redefining what constitutes a “paper,” with the idea of publishing smaller bits of data faster.
Alexander Pope said that “the proper study ...
