19 April 2012

Anyone involved in the world of coding and open science will be familiar with github, the online code repository which enables sharing of software, but crucially also lets people take that software and amend/adapt/add to it. This is done through a process known as forking and you can read all about it here.

It struck us that this is not dissimilar to how the majority of research works in the scientific world. Barring the occasional quantum leap, the majority of scientific research is evolution, rather than revolution. Building gradually on previous work with new insights and results.

Therefore we have decided to conduct an experiment. As of today, all papers accepted for publication in our multidisciplinary journal, QScience Connect, will also have the xml of those files deposited in our github repository: qsciencedotcom/connect

The idea here is that readers will be able to amend/adapt/add to the manuscript incrementally, without necessarily needing to construct a new manuscript for publication.

We're not sure where this will go, but we are looking at using it for peer review and possibly even publication of a journal. 

All feedback welcome.