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May 26, 2009

Interactive Academic Journal Articles

Here's an interesting volley in the debate about scholarly publishing. Now that the Reed Elsevier fake journals news is dying down, we might want to look at the real future issues involved in publishing for peers.

Academia 2.0: What Would a Fully Interactive Journal Article Look Like

Sean Gorman is pointing to a what a small team at George Mason University created as a sample journal article that tries to tap the web for "interactivity, data sharing, innovation, or peer review." Take a look at the article. It was some interactivity in charts and maps . The data forthe aper is downloadable which could provide better peer review or cold allow others to work with the research. You could consider such concepts as open commenting and tagging and going beyond linking. I like the idea of a word coud to supplement the abstract. Sean suggests that "you could create a journal in such a format leveraging interactive tools across the web like Swivel, InfoChimps, ManyEyes, YouTube, Google Charts, DataMash, or Flickr."

Of course there is a dog's breakfast of issues here related to sustainabilty, archiving, submission, etc. etc.

It's a very interesting concept though. Who is going to archive the tools? Opportunity knocks.

I am also particularly intrigued by articles that might link deeply into huge reposititories of data and information like the genome project.

Stephen

Posted by stephen at May 26, 2009 11:29 AM