Collaborative Scientific Publishing: A New Research Ecosystem

Committee:
Andrew Lippman
Senior Research Scientist
Associate Director, MIT Media Lab
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
César A. Hidalgo
Associate Professor of Media Arts & Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
W. Daniel Hillis
Visiting Professor of Media Arts & Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This thesis introduces PubPub, a complete publishing system that is consonant with the way software and research ideas are developed. It is author-driven, continuous, collaborative, and allows for data and code to be directly integrated into the document. PubPub is optimized for collaboration and iterative document creation; taking inspiration from the software development cycle it allows for more participatory forms of review. We hypothesize that by changing the scientific review process from one of static critique to one of interactive collaboration we can increase the error-detection rate of scientific review. We present an experiment to test this hypothesis by measuring error detection rates across several interactive and non-interactive documents. This work is motivated by a growing recognition that in many fields, notably those that rely on data analysis and computing, the existing review process is not sufficiently fair, accurate, or timely.