{"id":24,"date":"2011-04-13T13:49:00","date_gmt":"2011-04-13T13:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stephenfrancoeur.com\/beatingthebounds\/?p=24"},"modified":"2011-04-13T13:49:00","modified_gmt":"2011-04-13T13:49:00","slug":"scientists-complaints-about-slow-speed-of-journal-publishing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stephenfrancoeur.com\/beatingthebounds\/2011\/04\/13\/scientists-complaints-about-slow-speed-of-journal-publishing\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientists’ Complaints about Slow Speed of Journal Publishing"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m deep in the middle of James Gleick’s wonderful new book, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood<\/em><\/a>, and ran across this complaint from 1954 by scientists feverishly working the decode DNA who found inadequate the traditional communication channels of journal publishing:<\/p>\n

\n

They all had different coding ideas. Mathematically the problem seemed daunting even to [George] Gamow. ‘As in the breaking of enemy messages during the war,’ he wrote in 1954, ‘the success depends on the available length of the coded text. As every intellegience officer will tell you, the work is very hard, and the success depends mostly on luck…I am afraid that the problem cannot be solved without the help of electronic computer.’ Gamow and [James] Watson decided to make it a club: the RNA Tie Club, with exactly twenty members. Each member received a woolen tie in black and green, made to Gamow’s design by a haberdasher in Losa Angeles. The game playing aside, Gamow wanted to create a communication channel to bypass journal publication. News in science had never moved so fast. ‘Many of the essential concepts were first proposed in informal discussions on both sides of the Atlantic and were then quickly broadcast to the congnoscenti,’ said another member, Gunther Stent, ‘by private international bush telegraph.’ (p. 294)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The “private international bush telegraph” of today’s scholars has expanded to a range of communication channels and tools, including subject repositories, FriendFeed, Twitter, IRC, wikis, etc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m deep in the middle of James Gleick’s wonderful new book, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, and ran across this complaint from 1954 by scientists feverishly working the decode DNA who found inadequate the traditional communication channels … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36],"class_list":["post-24","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-scholarly-communication"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenfrancoeur.com\/beatingthebounds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenfrancoeur.com\/beatingthebounds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenfrancoeur.com\/beatingthebounds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenfrancoeur.com\/beatingthebounds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenfrancoeur.com\/beatingthebounds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenfrancoeur.com\/beatingthebounds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenfrancoeur.com\/beatingthebounds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenfrancoeur.com\/beatingthebounds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stephenfrancoeur.com\/beatingthebounds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}