Open access online science publisher The Winnower has made a huge leap in scientific publishing and now offers bloggers a way to assign a digital object identifier (DOI) to any post uploaded to their site. Once there, the post can be reviewed, etc. just like any other online paper. They will also be archiving soon via CLOCKSS. (See Note 1.) With a DOI plus archiving it means that a post (and any reviews) should be traceable in perpetuity. Very good developments!
I had the privilege of helping Josh, The Winnower's industrious founder and administrator, create a new publication category for Neuroimaging and then used my post on physiologic confounds as the first test case. The post now has its own DOI (DOI: 10.15200/winn.142919.97862 ) should you prefer that to a URL. I submitted via a Word document because I've found that Blogger will occasionally hide irrelevant HTML code that needs to be edited out by hand. This can be a problem if you're in the habit, as I am, of copy-pasting text (e.g. quotes from papers) into a blog post. There is a new facility that will submit directly from a blog but in my first test (using Blogger) there were some major formatting issues. Josh informs me that he will be adding a facility for the Blogger API eventually, but using Word as an intermediate step gives me a chance to clean up links to references and that sort of thing. I have plans to submit many other posts to The Winnower so please let me know either in the comments below, in a review on the The Winnower version of the post or via Twitter whether you encounter problems, have suggestions for improvements, etc. Also, do please consider submitting your own blog posts to The Winnower. Let's build the Neuroimaging category!
I was around for and involved in the nascent Web of the early '90s (see Note 2) and I distinctly remember NCSA's Mosaic, the Planet Earth Home Page virtual library, UC Irvine's online bookshop, and the Cambridge coffee pot. But the development of open, online publishing supported by social media like blogs and Twitter, as well as post-publication peer review (PubPeer and PubMed Commons), feels like a true revolution for science. I may be wrong but it feels like we will look back at the current period as a major change in the way we interact. It only took us two decades. Now, however, The Winnower is contributing disproportionately to our future. Thank you.
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Notes:
1. I already archive my important blog posts at The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. In addition to providing an invaluable service, the Wayback Machine is also a wonderful way to get nostalgic and kill a few hours :-/
2. I had an online poster at NMR Poster95, the first e-poster meeting of folks doing NMR and MRI. The front page of the poster got archived but the clickable poster itself is now defunct, I'm afraid. The wonderful Internet Archive does have other pages from my website at the time, however. They began archiving in 1996, and the earliest copy of my old website dates from January, 1997. Thank you, Internet Archive! There is also a summary of the first two NMR e-poster conferences in this paper from 1997.
