Making journal articles ‘live’: turning academic writing into scientific dialog

Abstract

Web 2.0 services and social networking offer possibilities to transform academic publishing to facilitate scientific dialogue. We present 'The Live Paper' in this editorial as a concept to consider how to leverage existing web technologies to produce rich, omnidirectional, and interactive narratives on research. Following the format of a traditional research report we describe and discuss how to enrich research reports utilizing various types of analytical tools, data, and web services in a published paper embedded in evolving scientific discourse. We also consider how the live papers would influence the practice, culture, and economy of academic research. We conclude that geospatial researchers have an opportunity to lead this development towards richer and more open ways of communicating our findings. The technology and infrastructure to do so exist today, but several barriers remain.

Opportunities and Impediments for Open GIS

“…An even more ambitious proposal is to eventually make research articles “live” so that data, analysis, results, and conclusions can be dynamically updated (Ahlqvist et al. ), thus sustaining a real‐time dialogue among the interested parties. The dataverse network (http://thedata.org) is a significant step towards open publication by sharing research data with those interested in sustaining the dialogue.…”

Crossing the qualitative-quantitative chasm III

“…Open collaboration: participation and collaboration among and between both geographers and non-geographers in all tasks related to research -data collection, analysis, and writing/publication, in line with the spirit of crowdsourcing. An even more ambitious proposal is to eventually make research articles 'live' so that data, analysis, results, and conclusions can be dynamically updated (Ahlqvist et al, 2013) (Burton, 2009). Although exciting, issues remain to be resolved along multiple fronts for the open-science paradigm (Sui, 2012).…”

A New Age of Discovery: The Post-GIS Era

“…Fundamentally however, institutions are changing and adapting the technology to fit their circumstances and established management cultures. As Gray points out, we can see this occurring in scholarly publishing which is moving to greater open access of articles and also data (AHLQVIST et al 2011). …”