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The Molecular Systems Biology blog on Systems & Synthetic Biology

I hear sometimes the claim that within 5–10 years, more than 95% of the scientific literature is going to be read by computers only. Possible. But what if 95% of scientific papers could be ‘written’ by computers? In other words, rather than mining thousands of unread papers, the scientist of the future may rather search the web for relevant data first and integrate it to generate – or ‘write’ – novel insight. In fact, integration of large datasets already represents a major field of research in systems biology. New publishing models should thus ‘embed’ more structured data into online publications. At the extreme, one could even imagine to publish ‘naked’ datasets, without any ‘stories’ around them. Even if the good old-fashioned papers are probably not going to disappear as publication units, there might be some equilibrium to find between papers that will never be read except by a text mining engine and pure datasets, published as a resource, easier to search and to integrate. If assorted with proper credit attribution mechanisms and metrics of impact, data-rich (or even data-only) publications may represent an alternative model complementing the traditional ‘paper’ format. It would prevent the loss of useful data otherwise buried in verbal descriptions and, most importantly, would hopefully stimulate web-wide integration of disparate datasets. À suivre…

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