Proposal: consider scientific research papers like open source software

Nothing wrong with the idea per se. But, as usual, no explanation for how the incentives and cultural changes needed to induce people would be implemented. Sorry, but no one is going to reward a grad student, career-wise, for rewriting other scientist's papers and catching bugs. Heck, the only reason scientists proofread their stuff <i>at all</i> is to avoid embarrassment. If there were an army of students eager to fix your mistakes, scientists would be even <i>less</i> careful.

Along related lines, Tim Gowers (a Fields medalist in mathematics) has started the Polymath Project, which has produced several excellent, massively collaborative, research papers in math.<p><a href="http://polymathprojects.org/" rel="nofollow">http://polymathprojects.org/</a>

as a researcher I am completely on board with this idea-but to work it has to be built into the culture, the grants, and the way hiring is done. even demanding code be open source is an uphill battle, no major grants in my field provide any money for support, maintenance, hosting etc. or demand code be open-sourced for funding.

This is a wonderful idea, particularly since even a partial implementation would do good. Just having a license for derivative works and the latex source would do wonders.<p>A typical situation is that you notice an obvious extension to a result in a paper, which does not warrant publication. Being able to make an updated version of a paper with that easily would be a good thing.

I can't even access half the published papers I want to read, so I suspect the scientific community will need to solve that problem (ie how to throttle the publishers) before any thought of allowing versioning and revisions to papers.<p>As well, how would references work? Citations would have to reference a specific version of every paper, which could potentially create a huge mess.<p>But I totally agree that change needs to come to the way scientific papers are published and accessed, and this is one of the better ideas I've seen out there.

&#62;We spend much time perfecting irrelevant papers to get them through peer review.<p>Maybe stop publishing irrelevant papers? Admitted, academia has serious problems. The solution isn't open source though.<p>Building a collaborative framework around research would be great, but solidarity and small group research will continue to be the primary drivers of innovative research.

Good idea but why make thing so complicated? Research papers isn’t code -- they don’t have to "compile". Just write what you want in your blog/site/etc and link. If you want it all in one place, set up a wiki.

I know of one existing journal that is pretty close to this, the insight journal: <a href="http://www.insight-journal.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.insight-journal.org/</a>