COMMENT Dragging scientific publishing into the 21st century Razib Khan 1 , Laurie Goodman 2 and David Mittelman 3,4* Abstract Scientific publishers must shake off three centuries of publishing on paper and embrace 21st century technology to make scientific communication more intelligible, reproducible, engaging and rapidly available. The Internet has massively disrupted how we communicate - primarily for the better. Many business sectors, however, have struggled to adapt to online platforms, with many simply resisting change. The newspaper industry is an example of a centuries-old industry persisting in the face of new conditions - until it can’t. In the early 1990s the Web began displacing traditional information delivery. By the mid 2000s it had become a widespread facet of life in many countries. Web 1.0 journalism translated ink to pixels, but as technology advanced the slow erosion of print became a landslide [1]. Scientific publishing is following a similar path, with its hesitance to adapt and slow (or no) adoption of the many advantages the Internet affords. For now, scientific publishing remains profitable. Never- theless, its sustainability rests upon antiquated pillars. Scholarly print journals date back hundreds of years to the availability of a cheap distribution method with the intro- duction of the printing press. Most journals have made only incremental changes. A few have taken some advantage of the Internet and experi- mented with multimedia, but use of the medium has been limited primarily to extra content, such as unsearchable encyclopedic online supplements to accompany articles that maintain print page limits; or publishing many more articles by relaxing peer-review requirements for ‘novelty’, as exemplified by PLoS ONE, which has published 30,000 articles in 2013 alone [2]. Overall print-era anachronisms * Correspondence: david.a.mittelman@gmail.com 3 Virginia Bioinformatics Institute and Department of Biological Sciences, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA 4 Gene by Gene, Ltd, Houston, TX 77389, USA Full list of author information is available at the end of the article still persist through the continuation of page limits and sur- charges and the release of discrete issues, as if all articles remain subject to print-only production schedules. So how do we imagine the future of scientific publishing? Embracing the Internet to make science intelligible and reproducible The scientific community has historically relied upon pub- lishers for the advancement of science. The publishing community expanded its outlets as new methods of deliv- ering content became available. But communicating science is more than just spreading information. How to realize this in 2014 is a fertile area for creative innovation as compared with 1650. Some aspects of intelligibility are stylistic, while others are more substantive. On the substantive end, data and method release should be mandatory in a manner that en- ables rapid reproducibility on the part of the audience. Data storage costs have plummeted [3], so publishers could provide data hosting. Note: we are not talking about adding yet another repository, which many - rightly - feel are already so prevalent they make data more fragmented and less useable. However, there are growing challenges in properly curating data as data size grows. There is also a desperate need to organize the complex and growing amount of associated metadata, which is essential for in- telligible data re-use and scientific reproducibility. This seems like an area in which publishers could take a major role. Having a database accessible and operable by a pub- lisher will provide a ‘ sandbox’ , to organize, make available to reviewers, and build tools for data that are directly linked to specific publications. These data can then be dis- tributed to appropriate community-approved data reposi- tories, or publisher repositories can serve as short-term or (if needed) long-term means to host data types that have no community-approved repository. Journals should also proactively engage researchers in developing and integrating best practices and standards, and incorporate tools by which the data associated with © 2014 Khan et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. The licensee has exclusive rights to distribute this article, in any medium, for 12 months following its publication. After this time, the article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Khan et al. Genome Biology 2014, 15:556 http://genomebiology.com/2014/15/12/556