Scientific literature in the 21st century

A couple of months ago CTWatch Quarterly¹ published a special issue on “The coming revolution in scholarly communication and cyberinfrastructure.” In that issue, Clifford Lynch of the Coalition for Networked Information writes about “The shape of the scientific article in the developing cyberinfrastructure.” I won't attempt to summarize the whole article, but I do want to comment on a couple of points.

• Lynch notes that traditional scientific journals mostly present digested and summarized versions of the data from which conclusions are drawn.² That is rapidly changing. More and more journals are allowing authors to provide supplementary online information. Sometimes this information consists merely of more detailed analyses and protocols, but increasingly the raw data on which the conclusions were based are included.³ In certain research communities publication of an article has become contingent on providing access to the raw data &ndah; DNA or amino acid sequences in the case of molecular biology and atomic coordinates in the case of tcrystallography are two examples that come immediately to mind. Wide access to data has the potential to transform many fields. The entire field of bioinformatics would barely exist were it not for the foresight of those who established Genbank, EMBL, and other repositories for sequence information.
• Genbank and EMBL demonstrate what can happen when raw data is made freely available for computational analysis. Lynch suggests an even more profound revolution may lie in our future, a future in which not just our data, but the text of our papers become the object of computational analysis. I'm still tryng to wrap my head around what that will mean, but I'm sure that in fifteen or twenty years, we'll live in a world where tools for computational analysis provide insights as important and are as widely available and familiar as BLAST and other bioinformatics tools are now.

Great challenges lie ahead, but the promise is even greater. As Miranda might have put it:

O, wonder!
How many goodly discoveries are there here!
How beauteous the scientific literature is! O brave new world,
That has such hypotheses in't!
(with apologies to Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 5, Scene 1).

¹From the CTWatch Quarterly website: “CTWatch Quarterly is an online journal that focuses on cyberinfrastructure related research critical to collaboration and information dissemination within the science community as a whole. Each issue of CTWatch centers on a topic with currency and importance to this community with articles written by experts in their field from both academia and industry.”

³In our pollination biology seminar this morning, for example, the supplementary information associated with Brian Barringer's article in the American Journal of Botany provides a table of chromosome numbers, ploidy levels, and outcrossing rate estimates for all of the taxa included in the analysis.