Introduction
Historic Dynamic Publishing Using Printed Journals and Books: Revising Editions or Publishing Novel Books and Articles
Preprint, Postprint and (Open) Peer Review
Follow-Ups and Retractions
Current Aspects of the Publication System in Regard to the Dynamic Knowledge Creation Process
The Production Process is not Visible to the Reader
The Contribution of Individual Authors is not Visible
Finalized Versions do not Allow Changes, Thus Making Corrections and Additions Nearly Impossible
Redundancy in Scientific Publications—Currently no Reuse and Remixing
Legal Hurdles to Make Remixing and Reuse Difficult
Technical Hurdles in Reusing Content—“Publisher PDF” Files are Mimicking Print
Dynamic Publication Format—General Concept
Dynamic Publication—Challenges
Aspects of Dynamic Publication Formats
Dynamic
Authorship
Openness
Tranclusion, Pull-Requests, and Forking—Lifecycle and History
Publication Formats
Content and Quality Control
Cultural Background
Current Implementation of Dynamic Publications
Scholarly articles | Blogs/microblogs | Wikis or other collaborative authoring tools | Social coding/GitHub | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Application
| One-time and nonrecurring release of a novel scientific finding | Irregular contributions, with novel findings, ongoing research and comments on third party findings | Collaborative writing, structuring of knowledge, work-flow processes, or as a tool to collaboratively prepare publication with several authors | Closed projects with a clear defined aim, e.g. producing a running computer code |
‘Reviewability’: Quality assurance and evaluation through others
| Independent peer-review; retraction and comments only through publisher; comments; delayed assessment through citation data, in progressive journals usage statistics and altmetrics | Comments, usage data, social network metrics | A group of authors or a community releases and accepts novel content using a structured reviewing process, whereof the reviewing process is usually open; open comment functionality; usage data and social network metrics | Usage data by tracking code pull requests; third party reuse |
Continuity and integration with the scientific knowledge creation process
| Referencing; Development of the article only during creation and peer-review process; Usually hidden from the public | Serial publishing of novel contribution; links to other blog posts/articles; comments and trackbacks allow dynamic interaction | Continuous collaborative creation and changing of content; history function available | Continuous working as a team on a common project; results can be reused by other projects |
Authorship and accountability of contributions
| Authors provide information about their contribution; author position is negotiated | Usually the blogger is the only author | Exact labelling of the contribution, independent from size | Exact labelling of the contribution, independent from size |
Collaborative content control
| The content is provided only by the authors; content and relevance controlled by the editorial board of the journal | Single author is responsible for content; commenting is allowed | Wide consent on the scope of the project; conflicts will be addressed and solved by majority decisions; everybody can contribute | ‘Maintainer’ decides about acceptance or rejection of changes; if conflicts exists, project can be divided into two sub projects (‘forking’) |
Technical reusability
| Potentially possible, but practically limited by PDF format; little use of markup languages and remixing mechanisms such as “forking” or “transclusion” | Usage of markup languages including HTML; but no implementation of remixing or forking mechanisms | Highly reusable; content is highly structured; flexible markup language; transclusion within the platform; easily traceable transclusion | Highly reusable; examples for usage of markup languages such as Markdown and Pandoc for text publications; forks easily and often done; traceable |
Legal reusability
| More and more use of more open copyright licenses; | Almost only use of open copyright licenses that allow reuse | Very high; wikipedia-like or creative commons licenses | Very high; free licenses that allow reuse |
Implementations
| Proprietary journal platforms or open journal platforms such as Open Journal System of public knowledge project (see chapterThe Public Knowledge Project: Open Source Tools for Open Access to Scholarly Communication) | WordPress with wide spread use; other blogging solutions | MediaWiki with wide spread use; proprietary tools such as Google Docs | GitHub or free repository platform Git; Sourceforge or CVS |
History function
| Traces of creation process usually deleted; no history function | No traces of creation process; no history function | Complete traces of creation process and history of articles; seamless traces of discussion | Complete traces of creation process and history of articles; seamless traces of discussion |
Openness, in general
| Closed, after publication after paywall/Open Access | Closed until publication than open | Form very beginning open to a wide community | Form very beginning open to a wide community |
Readability in style/Redundancy: 1. In the best case
| Ability to frame a finished research result, in homogenous writing style by one (or a few) author(s) | Direct reporting of research results with readability of (good) science journalism. | Capacity for continuous refinement and correction of text; authors allowed to remix/translate from previously existing articles | Capacity for continuous refinement and correction of text |
Readability in style/Redundancy: 2. Challenges and problems
| External pressures to ‘publish or perish’ and therefore diluted and dispersed results | Often “serialized” reporting of ongoing, not yet finished research. As such mostly addressing peers in same research topic area (e.g. by not making clear research aims, presumptions, methods used, etc. in each new blog post) | Hard to maintain consistent encyclopaedia-level content and readability with large author community. In addition, this often leads to wiki-bureaucracy, e.g. meta-level of templates, rules, acceptance of proposed changes, etc. | At present, few experiences with article-style collaborative knowledge production in code repositories; by now mostly used for production/collection /integration of code and data |
Compared e.g. to wiki/social coding writing style: unusual to “remix” previously existing text and/or make later corrections in style | ||||
Acceptance within scientific community
| Together with books in most disciplines the essential part of scientific publishing; officially credited | Somewhat accepted, but most often not credited | Widely used, but contribution not credited | Used, e.g. for production and maintenance of software code, in some cases data collections/documentation; Most often not credited |