A call for disruptive innovation in science publishing with a new open data-sharing platform for the life sciences

Abstract

“A disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect.” -Wikipedia On April 3rd, 2012 Nature Precedings, Nature Publishing Group’s experiment in free pre-print publishing was shut down and no longer accepts submissions. According to the Nature Precedings website it was created in 2007 as “a place for researchers to share documents, including presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and non-peer-reviewed manuscripts.” It was designed to “provide a rapid means for scientists to share preliminary findings, disseminate emerging results, solicit community feedback, and claim priority over discoveries.” It was designed in a way to “make such material easy to archive, share and cite.” Now that Nature Precedings is no more, a new disruptive open data-sharing platform (ODSP) for the life sciences is needed. Based, in part, by the model Nature Precedings established. Here I propose 5 qualities of an ideal ODSP and outline 10 benefits (see Table 1) to scientists for embracing such a potentially disruptive model.