Science is constantly correcting itself. When researchers write a study, other researchers look at it, and then even more so when it’s published. What is wrong can be corrected. For several years, a whole strand of science has also been working on creating proposals for a new publication system in the scientific community. Because that also contains certain things – some would say “mistakes”, others perhaps only speak of “wrong incentives”. Everyone should agree that there is room for improvement. Now the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc), a British non-governmental organization that develops and promotes new technologies for research and teaching, has presented a “groundbreaking open research platform”: octopus.
Octopus, so the promise, should enable the fast, free and fair publication of research results that is open to everyone. The platform should change nothing less than the entire incentive structure in science, says Alexandra Freeman of the Winton Center for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge, who leads Octopus. The platform eliminates the problem of scientific work being judged solely on its results, which can lead researchers to choose impressive-sounding results over sound theory and methodologies. “It will encourage researchers to specialize in their skills as theorists, methodologists, data collectors, analysts, implementers or critics, rather than trying to do everything at once,” Freeman said. Researchers could thus concentrate more on the quality of their work.
In fact, the platform fits into a trend that has been increasingly evident in the open science scene for several years: away from result evaluation towards process evaluation. Good research instead of good results. In this case, good research means: cleanly derived hypotheses, a sufficient number of subjects, the appropriate statistical methods, transparent reporting. It’s not as if the conventional publishing industry completely ignores this shift in focus. There, too, there are journals that attach great importance to the methodology and, for example, check the structure of a study before the data is collected. There are magazines that publish zero results – i.e. those that turn out differently than previously assumed – or those that make sure that all the data is published so that skeptics can do the math.
Why shouldn’t the writing of research snippets also be subject to constraints?
But Octopus wants to go one step further and break up the classic article format – introduction, method section, results, discussion – into individual parts. Researchers can therefore publish small individual contributions on the platform in the categories problem, peer review, hypothesis, protocol, result, analysis, interpretation and application. The one big paper that contained all of this no longer exists. Individual contributions can be rated from zero to five stars by other researchers. The advantages for researchers are said to be that they can publish their articles more quickly and do not have to wait months for a magazine to respond. In addition, they can only publish in areas in which they are experts: one person may be more familiar with methods, the next with transferability to everyday life.
But is this groundbreaking? One who can assess this quite well is Malte Elson, junior professor for the psychology of human-machine interaction at the University of Bochum, he does a lot of research on the research itself. “The page describes a rather ambitious goal, namely an alternative to the classic paper,” says Elson. “What’s not entirely clear to me: What problem does it solve?”
In the case of large research projects, it can certainly make sense not to wait until the very end with publications. “But this is already possible, for example in dedicated technical journals for methods,” says Elson. “The benefit of an early publication of a hypothesis – which, for example, in the social sciences is often not formalized but consists of only a few sentences – detached from any theoretical or empirical work, is not immediately apparent to me.” In addition, according to Elson, it is not entirely clear to him “why the writing of research snippets is not subject to exactly the same constraints as the writing of a classic essay”.
So it is not yet certain that the rest of the professional world will also consider the project as groundbreaking as those responsible for Octopus do themselves, and that Octopus will revolutionize the publication system. But maybe it doesn’t have to be. A few advantages result from this as well.
He likes the basic idea of making research processes transparent, says Elson. “In this way, the public can be informed very clearly about how research works, from the initial idea through to application.” The project is also interesting for the further training of the researchers themselves and especially their offspring. “I could well imagine using it in teaching future scientists,” says Elson.