Let’s rebuild research communication as an extension of the research process

There’s been an increase in concerns about research integrity in the past few years, with more researchers being called out for everything from missing information, to sloppy science, to straight-up fraud. The question is: is science getting worse, or are long-standing issues simply more visible due to the increased transparency that comes with Open Science? Could both be true?

The trouble with research articles

Modern research communication was born out of established print norms. In print there is a necessary gap between conducting science and sharing it. This gap has, over the years, been filled with a convoluted print legacy publishing system. Researchers set aside all the work they do—collecting data, analyzing it, discussing it with colleagues, coming up with conclusions—open up a blank document, and attempt to wedge everything into a formulaic template called a research article.

The research article format is a holdover from an era where there was no internet, no ability to access background information, place the new work in context, or link to data and supporting materials. To compensate, the print article had to cover not just the research findings, but all of the related information. That’s no longer true. And yet we’ve clung to the article as if it’s the best and only way to communicate science.

An entire industry earns billions of dollars maintaining the article-centric status quo. Access to grants, career advancement, tenure, and promotions hinge on article publication. Even amidst increasing calls for transparency, research integrity, faster progress, and better outcomes, funders and institutions continue to base incentives solely on this antiquated, slow, and incomplete research delivery mechanism.

That fundamental misalignment between researcher incentives and desired outcome leads to stagnation, unnecessary repetition, inconsistent standards, and lack of reproducibility, and creates pressure to the point that shortcuts and even falsification can seem worth the risk.

Placing research at the center of scientific communication

If stakeholders want a faster, more complete, transparent, and reproducible alternative to the research article, they must create structural incentives that facilitate and reward those characteristics.

The goal of publishing in high impact journals breeds competition over collaboration and encourages ‘saving up’ work to meet the demands of reviewer and editor expectations. That competition has led to a lack of standards and best practices in research processes, workflows, methodologies, and data management. Because these aspects of the research process were always invisible in the print era, they’ve remained so long after researchers embraced working in digital and computational environments.

If we bring the doing of science and the communicating of science together, the gap between conducting research and sharing it closes. Research conducted in a digital environment can produce digital communications complete with supporting data, metadata, methodologies, and analysis, all in one package. The package can be complete, machine-readable, and validated by AI. A new paradigm can emerge where research communication is born with integrity, with all the tools and information necessary to thoroughly understand, validate, reproduce, reuse, and build upon the work.

Already, a growing number of exciting technologies and tools exist to support such a research integrity pipeline. But researchers are not incentivized or supported in using them. Investments in infrastructure alone don’t consistently offer new pathways to conduct science and communicate it in fully digital cloud-based environments.

Rather than attempting to augment outmoded research articles with tacked-on signifiers of research integrity, wouldn’t it be better to focus time and effort on how research is conducted today? To consider the processes and pipelines through which data are collected, analyzed, packaged, and shared, and create new communications methods that complement the research process? Let’s fix the scientific communications by working from the research out, rather than the publication in.

Photo by Bart Anestin on Unsplash