Open Source Science vs. Peer Reviewed Journals

Sorta like a scientific FacebookWikipedia?

I think that as all of us dinosaurs die off this might work out. The universe is changing at the speed of light and some of us are too to adapt.

The rate at which new discoveries are made will increase as we go along too, and the current peer review system is out of the dark ages.

Now having said that, the only place I've ever presented technical papers was at CES some years ago so I hardly qualify as an expert.

I've actually been using ResearchGate for quite some time now- good discussions, no flame wars, but a lot of it more scientifically-oriented (rather than engineering-oriented) than CR4. A lot of students, and it makes me feel good to help youngsters get their feet wet. I also like some of the more technically oriented groups on LinkedIn (CFD groups, especially). Never found any use for Facebook or Twitter...

I also like the idea of Open Science, but am stymied by the issue of how to filter out the "noise" (i.e., over-unity advocates, etc.). With Open Science, one runs in to such fiascos as the Fleischman and Pons "Cold Fusion" situation, where "results" are published with inadequate disclaimers or proper vetting (interestingly, more people are doing some serious work in the "Cold Fusion" arena, now that the smoke has cleared...)

Anyway, I think the jury is still out on this issue.

You wrote, "Anyway, I think the jury is still out on this issue."

Out? They left the building doing double face palms never to return.

I am not a scientist but have a few friends in science. They hate the Journals. Mostly because they are a monopoly and charge monster amounts of money to let other people see other people's work. So really they are like realtors. I think to get published, you got to pay and I think you also have to pay for the peer review. And now that the stuff has gone electronic, for universities, etc, it has a self-destruct date in many cases and the universities are having trouble keeping the electronic journals on their shelves. And as far as I know, the actual repeating of experiments is not so important as it once was. (Not sure why)

Review is often just of methodology.

Science is crippled as well because of political interference. We have a scientist here in Canada who discovered 3 new salmon viruses. Result? The government is defunding her work, (not totally because she is a little famous) They don't want to know. Kristi Miller is the lady in Question. She lives in fear that they will take her frozen fish samples from a decade ago and destroy them so nobody can know when and where the virus evolved or was introduced. She is even shunned by her direct superior for reporting her findings. A 7 million dollar publicly funded genetics lab and they don't want her to publish. Mad world, eh?