Looking back and looking forward<\/b><\/p>\n
I recently received a reminder that it was my 13th anniversary of joining Twitter. I signed up to Twitter as a result of attending the Science Blogging conference<\/a> in London in 2008 where I heard how useful it could be. I’d heard about Twitter previously, but was not persuaded it would be useful to me.\u00a0 Well, it has proved enormously useful over the years.<\/p>\n It was at that event I also first heard about Open Notebook Science<\/a> – an idea that blew my mind. \u00a0It still feels pretty radical to consider sharing all your research results as they are generated, and not many researchers have followed this path. Maybe it’s still something for the future.<\/p>\n A report produced in 2019<\/a> by Elsevier and Ipsos MORI envisioned what the world of research will look like in 2029. They reviewed the literature and interviewed futurists, research funders, publishers, technology experts and researchers. The report makes interesting reading, with a number of possible scenarios outlined.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think it is any surprise that one of the conclusions about research outputs was that “the article structure is evolving and new forms will become the norm\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0But it\u2019s instructive to note that many of their respondents expected that articles would become further atomized, breaking into standalone elements.<\/p>\n Science Matters<\/b><\/p>\n Ten years after I learnt about open notebooks, a publisher called Science Matters came to give a talk at my institute. Someone working for them had earlier been a postdoc with one of our researchers and he\u2019d arranged for her to visit. Science Matters\u00a0<\/a> at that time published two journals:<\/p>\n Instead of publishing stories,\u00a0<\/i>Matters<\/i><\/b>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/i>Matters Select<\/i><\/b>\u00a0publish single, validated observations, thus highlighting the fundamental unit of scientific progress \u2013 the observation.<\/i><\/p>\n After the talk I did discuss whether the institute should sign an agreement with Science Matters for unlimited publishing by our researcher. I decided against it. I couldn\u2019t justify the upfront costs without clear evidence that this new publishing platform was something our researchers would be motivated to use. Also, the costs of publishing five single-observation micropublications seemed to work out higher than those of publishing one regular paper with five observations.<\/p>\n Sadly the Science Matters\u2019 website has now disappeared from view and is only available on the Wayback Machine. Their Twitter account<\/a> still exists but is silent.<\/p>\n Micropublications<\/b><\/p>\n Learning about Science Matters was my first introduction to what I now know to be micropublications. I\u2019ve since seen other examples of micropublications \u2013 for instance Flashpub<\/i><\/a>, Experimental Results<\/i> <\/a>(from Cambridge University Press) and microPublication Biology<\/a>.<\/i> These micropublication platforms are another approach to the early sharing of research results. They are less radical than open notebooks but still represent a bold move.\u00a0 They will soon be joined by the new Octopus<\/a> platform.<\/p>\n As I\u2019ve explored the world of micropublications I have observed that the term \u2018micropublishing\u2019 seems to have a variety of meanings – see this Wikipedia entry<\/a> – but I\u2019m using the term \u2018micropublication\u2019 as it seems to be reasonably well understood.<\/p>\n A micropublication, also called a Single Figure Publication, is \u201ca peer-reviewed report of findings from a single experiment<\/a>\u201d. You could say that micropublications are the ultimate in salami slicing \u2013 the least publishable unit<\/a> of research.<\/p>\n Another term I\u2019ve seen is \u2019nanopublication<\/a>\u2019 – basically a single statement such as \u201cmisexpression of DUX4-fl, even at extremely low level, can recapitulate the phenotype observed in FSHD patients in a vertebrate model\u201d expressed in a formalised way.\u00a0\u00a0For me this rather stretches the concept of what is a publication, but it seems to be a term used in the semantic web community. \u00a0A recent article<\/a> by Fabio Giachelle, Dennis Dosso, Gianmaria Silvello provides a useful introduction to nanopublications in life sciences.<\/p>\n In theory<\/b><\/p>\n In a thorough exposition<\/a> in 2014\u00a0Tim Clark, Paolo Ciccarese & Carole Goble laid out their ‘micropublications semantic metadata model\u2019:<\/p>\n The micropublications model is adapted to the Web, and designed for (a) representing the key arguments and evidence in scientific articles, and (b) supporting the \u201clayering\u201d of annotations and various useful formalizations upon the full text paper.<\/i><\/p>\n The micropublication approach goes beyond statements and their provenance, proposing a richer model in order to account for a more complete and broadly useful view of scientific argument and evidence, beyond that of simple assertions, or assertions supported only by literature references.<\/i><\/p>\n This is a re-imagining of research outputs for the 21st century, designing them to build into a corpus of knowledge that is fully formalised and evidenced.\u00a0It is quite a theoretical vision of a micropublication and I am not sure to what extent current micropublication platforms have been guided by this kind of theoretical approach.<\/p>\n In practice<\/b><\/p>\n A more pragmatic vision from Long Do and William Mobley in 2015 describes the Single Figure Publication<\/a> (SFP) as a more manageable method to inform research. They define an SFP as:<\/p>\n consisting of a figure, the legend, the Material and Methods section, and an optional Results\/Discussion section, reduc[ing] the unit of publication to a more tractable size. Importantly, it results in a markedly decreased time from data generation to publication. As such, SFPs represent a new means by which to communicate scientific research.<\/i><\/p>\n They also look towards a more structured corpus of scientific literature:<\/p>\n It will serve as a forerunner of the nanopublication, a modular unit of information critical for machine-driven data aggregation and knowledge integration.<\/i><\/p>\n Adoption<\/b><\/p>\n What will it take to see a large-scale adoption of single-figure publishing? Will researchers see micropublications as a quicker and more manageable way to keep informed about new results?\u00a0\u00a0Or will they see them as a new fad in publishing that only \u2018publishing types\u2019 are talking about?<\/p>\n Richard Sever (co-founder of bioRxiv) at a recent meeting suggested that the latter was the case and said that he saw no evidence of strong interest from researchers in publishing single-figure publications.\u00a0\u00a0Indeed many researchers are not aware of what exactly SFPs or micropublications are.<\/p>\n On the other hand, if ten years ago you had asked a typical biomedical researcher what they thought about preprints then I suspect you would have received a pretty blank (at best) or negative (at worst) response.<\/p>\n Perhaps SFPs will be mainstream ten years from now, whether on new publishing platforms or in existing journals.<\/p>\n Open Research London – 29 September 2021<\/strong><\/p>\n If you want to learn more about micropublications, then you can register<\/a> for a virtual event organised by Open Research London on Wed 29 Sept 2021, 3pm – 4.30pm (BST).<\/p>\n Titled “Micropublications: publishing science results piece by piece”, it will be chaired by Michael Markle, publishing director of F1000Research, with the following speakers:<\/p>\n Register via this Eventbrite page<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Looking back and looking forward I recently received a reminder that it was my 13th anniversary of joining Twitter. I signed up to Twitter as a result of attending the Science Blogging conference in London in 2008 where I heard … Continue reading \n