““Publications are still reflecting how we compiled information 200 years ago,” he tells me, and “it’s a dead end of information that just exists and no one talks about.”
Productivity demands from governments and research funding bodies have increased the publication workload for academics, who have to write a new introduction and methods section for every one of their papers regardless of how marginal the result they are trying to publish. That wastes incredible time that could be better spent finding the next result.
ResearchGate is hoping to completely change that static paradigm of academic publications into something more dynamic. Madisch believes that “It’s only a matter of time until no one cares about where you publish.” To get to that world, the company asked a simple question: “Why don’t we convert all of our documents to a living home?”
Inspired by the concept of minimum viable products and the general startup approach to ambiguity, the company introduced the “ResearchGate Format (RGF)” for academic papers a few weeks ago. The idea is that papers should be spaces for social communication, allowing peers to comment and converse around the results rather than just merely reading them.”
I really like this – and it will take training ourselves, as scientists, in different kinds of community and collaboration.
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