Continual Improvement Process in Scientific Publishing

Abstract

In this contribution we discuss how continual improvement can be deployed in processes of scientific publishing using web-based technology and online access. By continual improvement process we understand ongoing activities with the aim to improve a product or a service. When applied to a field of scientific publishing, where the products are scientific papers, continual improvement process yields to a new ecosystem of scientific publishing. In this new ecosystem, the research papers are considered more as a service than as a product of research activity. In other words, under continual improvement paradigm the result of scientific publishing process is understood more as a channel to share the knowledge of authors with the scientific community. A scientific paper is not anymore understood as a static document once published than staying constant. A scientific paper is rather understood as a dynamic document evolving in time, which can have different versions and releases, published online, enabling incremental and continual improvement in analogy to software as a service, with software new version releases and software support enabling continual improvement of software. In continual improvement process applied to scientific publishing, the pre-publication peer review is replaced by post-publication open peer review, where any researcher can write a peer review of a version of already published paper or comment the paper, give the paper a rating etc. Based on reviews or new results authors can anytime release a new version of the paper, correcting errors resulting in releases with mirror changes or adding new incremental results creating major releases. Such new ecosystem should also enable to create much more accurate citations, for example to easily refer to concrete definitions or results from other papers. Instead of making each paper self-contained, such concept enables much more flexible work for researchers including efficient reuse of part of other papers, for example in form of short comments building up from another paper etc. As a result, a new methodology of evaluating the impact of scientific papers in particular and new methodology of bibliometrics in general should arise, including those aspects investigated by altmetrics. Continual improvement process in scientific publishing creates also new challenges for the stakeholders including libraries, such as the need to guarantee the long term online and open access to scientific papers understood as an evolving collection of versions, the need to ensure the access to all versions of a paper or the need to visualize changes between versions, etc.