Nature, one of the top 2 science journals, has an editorial out suggesting that scientists should publish their raw data in open-protocol online databases and use creative commons licenses to “stipulate both rights and credits for the reuse of data, while allowing its uninterrupted access by machines”, which is a nice way of putting it. And a brilliant thing to say. The editorial also hints at the disruptive (in a good way) potential of blog-model research publishing and collaborating schemes, a la arVix, which blows my mind in equal proportion to the degree to which I don’t yet quite understand it.

Back when the human genome was published, Nature was the journal that insisted that if the research groups behind the project wanted to publish in their journal, they would have to make the data, i.e. the map of the human genome, availble for review according to the basic tenents of the publication of peer-reviewed science. The other top science journal, “Science”, allowed some baloney compromise wherein people pretty much couldn’t access the data because the companies involved wanted to make money off it.

At the time, the impression was that Nature was the dawg and Science were wanks. This editorial confirms that hypothesis.

I’m fascinated to see how the arXiv model, currently co-dominant with traditional journals as the primary platform through which high energy physics research publishes, will play out across the sciences. ArXiv is a big step in a different direction in it’s current incarnation, and it suggests even more disruptive possibilities. Research via Blog. Rather than publishing a single canonical paper, breaking down your research into discrete steps and revealing those for comments from others, and citing the effects of other’s research on your own, along the way. Nature has to be thinking: if that’s where science published is headed, where is Nature headed? What is the role of a journal in that mileu? What of specific questions like: what happens to author attribution if your ideas are developed organically across a dispersed community of scientists that paralells the modern blogoshpere? How many authors do you allow for a given paper?

Well, Nature has some things to say about that, too. In the current issue’s News Features, there is a series of articles touching on these and related themes. Read them now, I assume they go behind a pay-wall after once the next issue comes out (raising the issue of open-access publishing, and the fact that Nature isn’t and won’t be anytime soon, but let’s look past that for now).

Doesn’t it give you a warm glow to think that the establishment might be composed of smart people who care about the larger good, even if that requires change? Bit shocking.

Nature also has this comic book about synthetic biology available online, as well as in boring old Nature 11, 429 – 434 (2004). Consequently they are scoring two links on BoingBoing in one day, which has got to be a all-world record for an academic journal.

Right on Nature, right on.