World Association of Young Scientists

Following up on last night's demo of a paper-turned-into-wiki-article, I am adding below a pictorial summary of some of the key issues. The comments are meant to apply to a typical paper, not necessarily just this one or other papers in this journal.

First, let's take a look at the anatomy of the paper in its native state (typically pdf, often HTML, rarely XML or other machine-readable formats).

While 140-character summaries of scientific papers seem to be the topic of today in some parts of my feedsphere (#sci140), I wish to get back to another way of making publications shorter and more efficient, as has been discussed before in various circumstances, e.g. under the label of micropublication.

Let me start by requoting John Wilbanks:

Science is already a wiki if you look at it a certain way. It’s just a highly inefficient one -- the incremental edits are made in papers instead of wikispace, and significant effort is expended to recapitulate existing knowledge in a paper in order to support the one to three new assertions made in any one paper.

In this spirit, I have taken one of my articles whose licenses permit reuse and modifications and turned its abstract and introduction into a demo on how publishing in a wiki-style environment may look like.