There are lots of other pressures on work. Take for example the principle investigator who after decades of working within the existing system finds one day that his grants aren't to be renewed. Nor are the grants of his professional colleagues. Their labs contract but they are all still there with serious science in front of them.

I've suggested to a friend in this situation that it might be a good time to rethink how academic science works. Pain begets change. Why not get ahead of it?

I'm close enough to science to smell change in the wind. I'm not close enough to lead change. But I will cheer anyone daring enough to step out of old habits and design a future that includes what we've learned about the internet in the last decade or two.


On Sep 14, 2012, at 11:59 AM, Ward Cunningham wrote:

Yup. I'm thinking the same things. Now, if all of these were the norm, how would work be different?

On Sep 14, 2012, at 11:31 AM, Samuel Klein wrote:

I don't know... how about:

You have a good project idea someone should do.  You publish it.
You know some people doing interesting work in the area who need x,y,z to tackle such a project, and add that.
You start a project.  You publish a pointer and project name.
Some collaborators join.  You publish names.
You get a target to take data from, have a meeting, and publish.
You finalize procedures and start implementing.  and publish.
You get first data.  and publish.
You get context for the data.  And publish.
You find time to look at the data, organize the context, add a summary, and publish.
You compile a full schedule of data, and run analysis, publishing your error logs and lab notebook pages on the fly.
You give a paper bag talk with slides (and publish)
You draft an abstract for peer review (and publish)
You finish an abstract and submit it for review (a. p.)
You get feedback from the journal you submitted to (a. p.) and revise (a. p.)
You get included in a major quarterly Journal, with polish (a. p.)
You get public commentary, cites, criticism; and make better talk slides (a. p.)
You add suggestions for your students or others to extend the work in future papers (a. p.)

Various fields adopt various subsets of the above; most have only a handful towards the end.


On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 2:18 PM, Ward Cunningham <ward@c2.com> wrote:
On Sep 14, 2012, at 11:09 AM, Samuel Klein wrote:

People should be able to publish their work as quickly as they like in a professional way, especially in fields that change rapidly and need to benefit from collaborating with one another.  

Hmm. What is the quickest way that we would ever want to publish our work? If we push on this hard enough we might change the nature of work. (Yes, I know, much in academia conspires against quick. Same for business and probably dating. But as a thought experiment, how quick could quick be?)


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Samuel Klein          @metasj           w:user:sj          +1 617 529 4266


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