Just as news, books and all other forms of printed material are undergoing their own revolutionary transformation from dead-tree media to the infinitely more malleable formats made possible by computers and the Internet, so too have scientific journals begun their slow, painful transition away from old, hidebound thinking.
Liquid Journals follow the disintermediated tendencies of the web to their logical conclusion: Liquid Journals do not rely on peer review. Instead, they are assembled by individuals or groups of scientists and experts using the Liquid Journals platform.
The Liquid Journals platform does not discriminate between peer reviewed and non peer reviewed papers, raw data sets and blog posts. The idea is that smart scientists can decide for themselves what belongs in their own liquid journal, and influential leaders and groups in the movement will organically accrue a readership to their journal according to the quality of the work they select.
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Like the blogosphere itself, Liquid Journals accrue readers not because they have a choke-hold on distribution, as is the case with traditional journals, but because their readers find them to be uniquely qualified to filter a particular field.
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Liquid Journals will also turn scientific publications into living documents, rather than static informational cul-de-sacs. Already scientist have the ability to search for papers by the number of times they've been cited -- imagine if that up-to-date information were an inherent part of the metadata of every scientific paper.
Liquid Journals could even solve the issue of publication quantity vs. quality. In a Liquid Journal, where results are grouped by third parties, there is no incentive to break the results of experiments into as many publications as possible. (A practice common among scientists whose value is measured by the length of their publication record.)
In this paper we rede fine the notion of "scientific journal" to update it to the age of the Web. We explore the historical reasons behind the current journal model, and we show that this model is essentially the same today, even if the Web has made dissemination essentially free. We propose a notion of liquid and personal journals that evolve continuously in time and that are targeted to serve individuals or communities of arbitrarily small or large scales. The liquid journals provide "interesting" content, in the form of "scientific contributions." that are "related" to a certain paper, topic, or area, and that are posted (on their web site, repositories, traditional journals) by "inspiring" researchers. As such, the liquid journal separates the notion of "publishing" (which can be achieved by submitting to traditional peer review journals or just by posting content on the Web) from the appearance of contributions into the journals, which are essentially collections of content. In this paper we introduce the liquid journal model, and demonstrate through some examples its value to individuals and communities. Finally, we describe an architecture and a working prototype that implements the proposed model.
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