Get rid of the science paper?

At the The Guardian, here’s a thought from a prof at King’s College. He begins with an overview of all the problems, then,

The solution to all these problems is the same as the answer to “How do I organise my journals if I don’t use cornflakes boxes?” Use the internet. We can change papers into mini-websites (sometimes called “notebooks”) that openly report the results of a given study. Not only does this give everyone a view of the full process from data to analysis to write-up – the dataset would be appended to the website along with all the statistical code used to analyse it, and anyone could reproduce the full analysis and check they get the same numbers – but any corrections could be made swiftly and efficiently, with the date and time of all updates publicly logged.

This would be a major improvement on the status quo, where the analysis and writing of papers goes on entirely in private, with scientists then choosing on a whim whether to make their results public.

Stuart Richie, “The Big Idea: Shoud we get rid of the science paper” at The Guardian (April 11, 2022)

Could we try it for five years and see?

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