Liquid journals: scientific journals in the Web 2.0 era

The Web has changed the way we create, consume, share and disseminate scientific knowledge. Publishing is now almost real time and free and papers are not longer the only form of scientific dissemination. We can now publish early ideas in blogs at ScienceBlogs.com, put pre-prints in online repositories, such as arXiv.org, experiments on MyExper-iment.org and datasets on our homepages. A brand new world of possibilities is open for scientific knowledge creation, dissemination and evaluation, causing the evolution of the notions of scientific contribution and scientific journal to serve the need of scientists to learn about novel, interesting research ideas and results. This new context poses also new challenges. Attention is now the obstacle to dissemination as opposed to the pre-web era in which publication and distribution were the limiting resources. However, the majority of existing journal models and tools remains unaware of the new opportunities and challenges posed by the Web. Th...