Post #3217588

@LudoWaltman@social.cwts.nl this is a great thread Ludo, thanks! Would have loved to have been at this meeting. I wanted to offer an alternative perspective to your three challenges, that instead there is only one. The challenge of social engineering. The other challenges you mention could all be easily solved if there was a collective agreement that we wanted to do it. This is particularly clear in the case of your challenge of openness. Technically this is trivially easy and has been for many years now. The only thing stopping it is the business model of journals that relies on information not being free, and career incentives that make us compete rather than cooperate. We should all feel a strong sense of collective shame that we haven't solved this problem. And I love your challenges of curation and dialogue but if we didn't have the social engineering challenge that leaves us stuck in an unchanging rut, we would have been experimenting with different approaches to these for years and would have made great progress. Instead, even the slightest hint of innovation (eLife) is ruthlessly attacked by corporate interests and by a small elite of powerful scientists who have done well by the current system.