R&D Publishing Post Peer-Review

Having played around a bit with blogging and other forms of digital communications, I have always come away a little dissatisfied that the medium discourages thought in depth.

In my view, that will soon change.

If you consider the complexity of some open source projects (I just spent a weekend trying to debug a build of some numerical software on Linux), then it is obvious that people do retain an appetite and competence for the "grand public effort".

Thus far, most of this effort relates to the (very valuable) public infrastructure of digital commuications and workflows. There is also a huge amount of freely available, and high quality, scientific software online. However, there is still a somewhat stunted development of the literary side of public science - meaning the publicaiton and sharing of new results.

Since I originally trained as an academic (usual PhD path in science and then into business via the military and finance), I do understand and respect the reasons for making an effort to polish and refine ideas into long-form communications that reference prior art.

However, I do not get rewarded with research grants for doing private R&D.

The majority of the work that I do is in nonlinear classical field theories, as applied to problems in quantum gravity, and extensions of the Standard Model.

While I make progress in some areas of these problems it is very far from fashionable since the mainstream are of the view that "no progress is possible". That seems like a shame.

I daresay there are many other areas of human scientific activity that do not get the imprimatur of "respect" from academia becasue the ideas are considered fringe.

Fringe or not, the fact that previous efforts along a line of enquiry did not yield much fruit does not seem like a good reason to shun any public communication of heteredox ideas in research. After all, respected theories such as Plate Tectonics started as the (presumed) ravings of a geosciences madman. History now tells otherwise...

The place where we now have a sweet-spot, in my opinion, lies at the intersection of data, computation, and novel mathematical and physical (or biophysical) theories. You can see this already in the large R&D labs of well-financed tech firms like Facebook, Google, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Uber, Alibaba, Netflix and others.

They now publish work under their own imprimatur.

Why can't individuals do this?

Well, of course, they can, and they do. Very often this happens through the mechanism of lodging a pre-print on arXiv.org (which I have done in the past, as a complement to the normal peer review process). That is certainly a good way to archive material.

One of the problems I encountered with traditional academic publishing was that my own work moved much faster than the publication system could cope with. Very often, I was in open conflict with scientific reviewers or journal editorial boards who would assert "X it not possible" or "So and so proved that you can't do Y". That is fine if they are right. However, I had already proved that X was possible and that you could in fact do Y, quite easily. If all of this stuff is held-up in piecemeal publishing wars with folks who have not seen the fuller picture, then you are destined to get nowhere. Both me, and Science, suffered.

Ultimately, that is why I abandoned the academic enterprise sometime around 1996. It just seemed to me like a colossal waste of time. Folks would argue past one another without really coming to grips with the important scientific questions, or so I thought.

Youth is good that way... Screw that... I am done and out of here!

However, it is not human to abandon your line of research simply because you got fed up with a stuffy and myopic publishing system. You are going to keep on working...

Fast forward to 2019, and I can see, just by reading other blog posts, that little old me did not happen to be an outlier. The experience related above was (is) condition normal!

That is both comforting and frustrating. Comforting, because when people start to share one common itch that needs scratching you can guarantee that they will. Frustrating, because the full transition to an Open Scientific Publishing system still has not happened yet.

The majority of my published effort is still up behind academic paywalls. Even if I told you about it, you could not go read any of it without paying around $30 USD for the priviledge.

How many folks would do that for a piece of scientific work?

To find out, I did an experiment...

Since the copyright I still control is for my PhD thesis, I published that on CreateSpace.

The entire thing is also free on Google Books.

Obviously, you would not expect many people to actually buy the book, but seven years on from that experiment I am happy to report that some do. Don't expect to make money, but the avenues are there to self-publish and distribute scientific research.

You see, I actually founded that research field, which is now quite active. It has to do with how you optimally measure states in a quantum system - like a quantum computer.

When I read the contemporary academic work, which builds on mine in part, I still see a lot of gaps. There are things I figured out thirty years ago that still are not widely known, if known at all. That is not, to my mind, a good situation for Science.

Science properly is a collective effort of humanity to make sense of our world. It is not the only such method, but it is an important one. If our publishing conventions, and obsession with fighting over academic honours, is preventing real progess then it is high time that we changed the situation and moved forward in a positive fashion.

I now see plenty of folks doing this in fertile fields like machine learning, and I think it is a good time to replicate their personal publishing strategy more widely.

Dear Reader, you already know what that is...

Take a blog as your personal digital home base.

Create repositories for your product: GitHub, Academia.edu, CreateSpace etc etc

Organise the more in depth material as a series... I will write on this more later, but it means using the digital identifiers that guide publishing search engines.

These are Digital Object Identifiers (DOI), book numbers ISBN and series numbers ISSN. That combined with your personal researcher identifiers, such as Orcid, defines you.

Add to this an Open Journal system such as this NumFOCUS project and you are away.

For most folks, that would likely be a collaborative effort where a bunch of you, or maybe a start-up that has its own R&D effort, starts the equivalent of the (rightly) famous Bell System Technical Journal. That was the in-house research journal of Bell Labs, the place thatgacve us the Transistor and many other innovations from the immediate post War era.

Now is the time to repeat that exercise, I feel.

When I look around, I don't need to tell anybody. I see, you are already doing it.

Now, I am too... Happy (vanity) publishing! Go forth to advance the Frontiers of Knowledge and beat back the Tides of Ignorance that otherwise threaten to engulf all that is good in human thought. These are good times to have a mind. Good times indeed!