ds002 - Radical Rapid Publishing

Overview

Some research communities are fortunate to have the resources to be primary focused on the advancement of their research and field, without need to conform to unproductive publishing traditions. Such groups have been relatively rare, which means they are often left without established norms for publishing practices that are more effective, which leaves the experimentation and discovery up to them. In such cases, an effective approach is to rapidly explore different techniques. The challenge is in moving rapidly without placing undue burden or communication demand on the researchers and team. There is also a needed balance between creating something that is familiar enough to be understood as legitimate, but novel enough to be meaningfully different and more effective.

In this demo we explore the proposal that that there are two distinct activities:

1. creating a structured, long-lived formal record of research activity and progress, and
2. iteratively creating new modes of presentation and organization for discovery and collaborative purposes.

Key Ideas

• There is a tradeoff between simplicity for researcher and simplicity for editorial process.
• There is a tradeoff between WYSIWYG and structured documents.
• Designing for making contribution (annotations, reviews, etc) as easy as possible. Provide a clear place for conversation and contribution.
• Experimenting with different formats and techniques is a requirement, but can’t come at the cost of confusion, otherwise participation will cease.

Important Details

• It’s important to get information as early as possible about a project. This is another reason to make the lift small for the researcher.
• Everything is a DOI’able pub.
• When working with different formats (documents, codebases, video, etc), there will never be a single “editor” solution, so don’t hold out hope for that. Instead, lean into supporting a diversity of editors that are right for the given format.
• It’s important to create a standard language (icons, etc) across different formats in the presentation view to create clear, comprehensible signals of impact/connections/etc.