8077 A New Model for Scientific Communication Based on Open Access and Crowdsourcing

Sunday, February 19, 2012
Exhibit Hall A-B1 (VCC West Building)
Sina Shahandeh , Department of Materials Engineering, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
The peer review process has become the standard form of assessing quality and merit of a scientific works for publication since 17th century. Since then, scientific fields and communities has been drastically evolved. Today, science is complex, highly specialized and yet interdisciplinary. Scientific communities are diverse and larger than ever before thus creating numerous challenges for this traditional process. New communication tools and especially web 2.0 has prompted new directions for the scientific dissemination. In this poster a new model for evaluating scientific papers is proposed. In this system, authors submit their original papers to an open access database. Papers then are organized to categories and can be read by the scientific community from different fields. Each reader is allowed to ranks the paper from different perspectives e.g. from writing style, methodology, analysis to data reproducibility. The collected evaluation data then is analysed by a web-based program to specify the ranking of the paper. Further, the ranking is used in refining search functionality of the database. The proposed system uses complicated algorithms to organize and determine credibility of papers and authors based on the input from the community and citations. The combination of open access and utilizing the power of crowedsourcing creates a system that can enhance dissemination and accessibility of knowledge.
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