It’s time to get rid of the peer-reviewed paper

The Bazaar of Scientific Knowledge | shishyko!

Is the current form of the scientific paper still optimal in 2025? How do we preserve, and efficiently leverage, the uncut gems of the scientific process?

The Bazaar of Scientific Knowledge | shishyko!

What if we didn't collapse all the knowledge from the scientific process into one paper?

Maybe scientific progress isn’t slowing, after all

A new paper takes aim at the claim that science has become less disruptive

The Drain of Scientific Publishing

The domination of scientific publishing in the Global North by major commercial publishers is harmful to science. We need the most powerful members of the research community, funders, governments and Universities, to lead the drive to re-communalise publishing to serve science not the market.

Plaudit — How to Give More Than One Like to a Scientific Article | Challenges and Issues of Modern Science

Is it possible to give more than one like on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other social networks? Have you ever wanted, just once, to “like with both hands”? If so — your wish has come true on the platform of our journal Challenges and Issues of Modern Science.

Science Must Decentralize

Knowledge production doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Every great scientific breakthrough is built on prior work, and an ongoing exchange with peers in the field. That’s why we need to address the threat

Why the Stockholm Declaration will never work

Abstract The Stockholm Declaration calls for a moral reformation of scientific publishing—replacing commercial publishers with scholar-led journals, rewarding quality over quantity and instituting independent oversight. While noble in spirit, it fundamentally misdiagnoses the disease. The crisis of science stems not from paper mills or profit motives but from systemic incentives that reward volume, novelty and prestige over validity and reliability. Non-profit ownership will not neutralize the prestige economy, sleuth-led policing cannot scale, and ‘integrity registries’ would merely replace metrics with surveillance. True reform requires rebuilding the publishing infrastructure as a public utility: publicly funded, free to publish and read, and stripped of hierarchy and financial incentives.

The Discovery Engine: A Framework for AI-Driven Synthesis and Navigation of Scientific Knowledge Landscapes

Scientific progress relies on the effective accumulation, synthesis, and critical evaluation of knowledge. Traditionally, the well-documented, peer reviewed publication served as the primary standard for filtering and disseminating credible findings within the scientific community. Recently, however, we are witnessing an unprecedented acceleration in research output, a veritable explosion of scientific publications across all disciplines [1]. Yet, this very abundance creates a paradox: the sheer volume threatens to overwhelm the mechanisms designed for its assimilation and synthesis. Researchers, even within highly specialized subfields, face an almost insurmountable challenge in keeping abreast of relevant developments, integrating disparate findings, and identifying the truly novel signals amidst the noise [2]. This information overload contributes to disciplinary fragmentation, hindering the cross-pollination of ideas essential for disruptive innovation [3]. Furthermore, persistent concerns regarding "reproducibility crisis" [2], predatory journals, inflation of research areas[4], growing retractions and the potential influences of bibliometrics on research direction [5] highlight systemic challenges in validating and prioritizing scientific contributions to fundamental knowledge.

The Engine of Scientific Discovery: How New Methods and Tools Spark Major Breakthroughs

Abstract. How do we spark new scientific discoveries? Why do some breakthroughs seem even accidental? And most importantly, how can we accelerate them and

A New Paradigm for Scientific Publishing, Peer Review, and Impact Assessment

Scientific publishing and peer review have evolved little in three centuries, while the demands placed on them have grown profoundly. The growing role of artificial intelligence has underscored deep, systemic shortcomings of an aging system that has largely evaded innovation, a system whose origins are appallingly closer to the invention of the printing press than to the internet. We can do better – much better. This article is intended as the beginning of a communal experiment: a living document that critically reviews the modern academic publishing and peer-review system and presents a concrete framework to address what bibliometrics experts¹ have characterized as "the pervasive misapplication of indicators to the evaluation of scientific performance". Building on the Leiden Manifesto, DORA, and a body of scholarship spanning many disciplines and decades, we present a community-governed, non-profit platform organized around three trust-weighted impact factors, for articles, authors, and reviewers, with full algorithmic transparency, an open development log, and structural decoupling of credibility scoring from content moderation and from monetization. We invite the community to discuss, critique, and help shape it.

Speculations on the Future of the Scientific Method

The following essay was published 20 years ago (January, 2006) on my blog The Technium. I edited the intro here, but the speculations are basically unchanged.

A budding discipline around how science gets read and judged - Aris

Scholarly publishing spent thirty years arguing about access. It has barely begun arguing about what readers do with the paper once they have it. At Aris we call that second argument scholarly interface design. Mike Morrison's community calls it ScienceUX. Either way it is becoming a field, and here is why it is worth your attention.