Beyond the article: Research needs to be published in many forms,and many media,many times along the way

Abstract

This paper is based on the author’s presentation at the 2024 NISO Plus Global Online Conference. It makes a case not for replacing the traditional peer-reviewed article, but for the need to publish research in other forms and media throughout the research process, well before that final, formal publication. It centers on the need for researchers to communicate and collaborate with their peers effectively, and to obtain feedback from them, ideally making the research better and more useful to the research community, rather than only enshrining it in a formally peer-reviewed, published Version of Record (VOR), sometimes a year or two after the research has been completed.

Introduction

Scholarly journals have been essential to the scholarly ecosystem for more than three hundred and fifty years. What is generally considered the first journal—and the longest continually published one—is the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions,1 published since March 1665. The scholarly article has been the gold standard for publishing science and scholarship ever since. Einstein’s first article on the theory of special relativity, ² published on June 30, 1905, and Watson and Crick’s seminal article on the structure of DNA, ³ published in Nature on April 25, 1953, are just two of the literally millions of scholarly articles that have made the world of science and scholarship the rich, dynamic, and essential ecosystem it is today.

But today’s scholars—especially scientists—need to communicate about their research long before the final peer-reviewed article is published. That communication needs to be done frequently, in smaller units, and in a variety of ways. Scholarly content is no longer just text. It is text, images, data, metadata, media, and more.

The issues

There are many reasons this has become so important—and arguably an urgent priority for the work of science and scholarship to be as effective as possible. Here are some of the issues.

• The article reporting on the research often does not get published until long after the research has been completed.

• Negative results are often not published, so other researchers may unknowingly duplicate the research, often with the same negative results. How wasteful!

• Text is not always the best way to convey some important aspects of the research. Other media, especially video, 3D rendering, and animation, are essential to some fields.

• Research data needs to be available and findable by other researchers working on related investigations.

• Code, reagents, protocols, and other resources are also needed if the ongoing research is to be truly useful to other researchers working in related areas.

• Those resources are essential to enable other researchers to repeat the research to confirm or contradict its results, a validation seldom done today.

This is not to say that the final, formally published, peer-reviewed article is obsolete. It is still the gold standard. It is usually necessary, but not always sufficient.

Progress is being made

While formal, peer-reviewed articles are still critically important in most disciplines—not just to inform other researchers, but also for purposes such as tenure and professional advancement—preprints and preprint servers have become more common. This was a particularly important development during the Covid pandemic: the rapid publication of preprints enabled critically important research to move dramatically faster, with dramatic results. In certain fields, such as some of the mathematical and physical sciences, preprints have become dominant, with some articles never even seeking formal peer-reviewed publication. In other fields, such as engineering and computer science, conference papers are essential—not only to communicate research, but also to provide the basis for professional advancement and tenure.

Preprints also address the issue of the need to publish negative results. The recently developed hybrid model of eLife ⁴ is a particularly interesting example of this. There, what has been considered a “preprint”—essentially a submitted, but not yet reviewed or accepted article—is made openly-available for review. The author then can revise the article and publish the results, to leave the preprint as-is, or to remove it from publication. There is no accept/reject decision on the part of the publisher; the authors decide whether and when to publish.

The result is that a parallel paradigm has emerged in contrast to the traditional review-curate-publish model (“RCP”). There is now an alternative “PRC” model: publish-review-curate. My expectation is that these two paradigms will co-exist indefinitely.

It is also now commonly understood that it is important to publish the research data. However, the current state is far from ideal. Data is often published in the institutional repository of the lead researcher (of which there are hundreds or perhaps thousands), and it is often shared in ways that make the data difficult or impossible for other researchers to use productively. The recent DataSeer ⁵ research is an important development, helping researchers determine where and how to publish their data so that it is not just available but findable. And resources such as CodeOcean ⁶ make it usable, facilitating sharing code and computational research.

NISO’s new CP/LD format

Sharing arbitrary portions of content, along with data, semantics, and other resources—as the research is underway—is what the new NISO CP/LD (Content Profile/Linked Document) standard ⁷ was developed to facilitate. It defines a flexible, extensible, standards-based format for combining content, data, and semantics. It is a machine-readable, self-describing markup that can be used to exchange data and content between systems, APIs, and services in arbitrarily small or large chunks.

CP/LD is based entirely upon web standards, standards used every day by researchers, authors, publishers, hosting systems, and service providers.

• HTML is used for the document and its structure.

• CSS ⁸ is used for rendering the content.

• JSON-LD ⁹ is used for metadata, context, and narrative semantics (e.g., identifying components like “abstract,” “hypothesis,” and “conclusions”).

• The schema.org ¹⁰ vocabulary is used for content semantics.

• Web Annotations ¹¹ are used to reference arbitrary locations in the content.

• The W3C Publication Manifest ¹² (which uses JSON-LD) is used for packaging all this up.

All of these are widely used international standards. This means that CP/LD is not a whole new language, a whole new technology—which would very likely impede its adoption. Instead, everything in CP/LD uses standards that researchers and publishers use routinely. Adopting it is extremely straightforward, and very useful.

Conclusion

Today’s research and publishing ecosystem has already evolved significantly beyond the centuries-old text-based journal article. Researchers today can publish their research in many forms: e.g., a video of a surgical procedure, a 3-D model of a galaxy, LIDAR ¹³ of an archaeological dig, an audio interview with a poet, a documentary of a decisive battle or a social movement.

While the formal, peer-reviewed article is, of course, still an essential part of the research and scholarly ecosystem, it is no longer the only—and in increasing numbers of cases, no longer the most effective—way for research and scholarship to be published. There are now a multitude of options for scholars and researchers to effectively communicate their research.

Scholarship is fundamentally collaborative. That is how progress is made.

About the author

Bill Kasdorf is Principal of Kasdorf & Associates, LLC, a publishing technology consultancy focusing on editorial and production workflows and technologies, standards and best practices, and accessibility testing and guidance. A founding partner of Publishing Technology Partners, ¹⁴ Bill is a member of the W3C’s Publishing Steering Committee and a Past President of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP). He is a recipient of SSP’s Distinguished Service Award, the magazine industry’s Luminaire Award, BISG’s Industry Champion Award, and NISO’s Cunningham Award. He is an active member of SSP, NISO, BISG, IPTC, and the DAISY Consortium.

Bill has led seminars, written articles, and spoken widely over four decades for publishing industry organizations and events such as SSP, the Charleston Conference, STM, AUPresses, ALPSP, BISG, and NISO. He is the General Editor of the Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing, a member of the editorial board of Learned Publishing, and a columnist for Publishers Weekly.

As a consultant, Bill has served diverse clients such as Pearson, Cengage, Wolters Kluwer, Kaplan, Norton, Bloomsbury, and Sage; scholarly and STM presses and societies such as the New England Journal of Medicine, the National Academies Press, PLOS, Taylor & Francis, the JAMA Network, the American Psychological Association, the IEEE, the American College of Physicians (Annals of Internal Medicine), the Cochrane Library, Getty Publications, and university presses such as Harvard, MIT, Toronto, Edinburgh, California, Columbia, and Cambridge; and global publishing and library organizations such as the World Bank, the British Library, the Asian Development Bank, OCLC, and the Publishing Office of the European Union.

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