The new academy

Exploring the emerging space of next-generation publishing

Academia is perfect

The state of academia is a subject that provokes no shortage of thousand word opinion pieces. I am not a person who writes thousand word opinion pieces. When I was in school, English teachers would write me frustrated notes: “You’ve answered the question perfectly, but you only wrote two sentences. You have to write more!”

So I’m not going to write an opinion piece. Instead, I’m just going to write a list of words. If you’ve been involved in academia recently, you can probably recognise what I mean:

1. hierarchy

2. death march

3. delayed gratification

4. white noise

5. cookie cutters

6. disciplinary barbed wire

7. diaspora

IYKYK.

The only word I’ll dive into here is the final one, diaspora. As academia becomes increasingly crowded, constricting and uncomfortable, as the eventual rewards of intellectual freedom are retracted, huge numbers of people are leaving. Not enough to cause a problem, as there are more than enough eager applicants to fill the gaps. But there will eventually come a tipping point: not when the pool of applicants dries up, but when the academic diaspora comes to rival its official sibling.

I think we could reach this point in just a handful of years. When we do, I think it will be largely down to new tools and processes that unleash the energies of the existing academic diaspora. I think the shift will transform academia in the manner of an earthquake, bringing its official and unofficial branches into a new equilibrium.

I am bullish on academia as a concept, if currently more in its unofficial than its official incarnation. For me, the changes can’t come fast enough. I can’t wait.

What’s in it for you?

Since I’m about to take a step away from official academia, and towards unofficial academia, I have to admit these predictions are partly fuelled by hope. But these kinds of shifts won’t happen without hope. It’s people like us who will drive this change, when and if it comes, by exploring other ways to produce and disseminate knowledge, to argue in public and hold each other accountable, to share credit for sparkling insights and hard graft, to learn and correct our mistakes.

With this in mind, I’m going to mention a few tools I’ve seen recently that I think look super promising and plan to experiment with in the next year or so. I don’t expect any of them to produce a big cultural shift by themselves or overnight. But they are part of the rising sea which “advances insensibly in silence, nothing seems to happen, nothing moves, the water is so far off you hardly hear it. . . yet it finally surrounds the resistant substance.”

Seeds of Science

theseedsofscience.org

Seeds of Science… is a journal and community dedicated to nurturing promising ideas (“Seeds of Science”) and helping them blossom into scientific innovation. We have one primary criterion: does your article contain original ideas that have the potential to advance science?

Seeds of Science has a great disruptive strategy, focusing on an entirely different part of the value chain to conventional academic publishing and putting emphasis on building community. It remains to be seen how well their open review system works for assessing contributions from specialist domains - that said, it’s the only one of these tools currently with a formal review system.

Octopus

octopuspublishing.org

With Octopus, you can establish priority and record your work in full detail. Open by design, Octopus is free to use and publishes all stages of the research process, whether it is a hypothesis, a method, data, an analysis or a peer review.

Octopus aims to provide a full alternative to conventional publishing, giving researchers the freedom to share and recombine individual components instead of having to stitch them together into full “papers” before publishing. For now, it seems to have a very strong focus on experimental science.

ResearchEquals

researchequals.com

You produce vital outputs at every research step. Why let them go unpublished? Publish your text, data, code, or anything else you struggle to publish in articles. Each step gets a DOI. Link them all together to document a journey.

ResearchEquals works on a similar principle to Octopus, but is less opinionated with more types of components and less focus on structure. So far, it seems to have more activity in the humanities and social sciences.

Final words

All the tools mentioned above aim to either supplement or replace the existing academic publishing system. Why is this so important? Aside from the many and well documented failings of the existing publishing system within academia, much of it is simply closed to anyone without an institutional email address. On the other side is the unrestricted “grey literature”, which is treated at best cautiously by professional researchers. The significance of this kind of tools is that they hold out the promise of a recognisable middle path. This is why I expect these tools to be so important in terms of accessibility, and help bridge the gap between academia’s official and unofficial branches.

rachel @stubborncurias