I’m having a discussion on Twitter about the value of journals, etc., in this age. You’ll hear more from me on that topic in the near future. But right now I want to tell a quick story about how novel distribution and communication channels speeds up everything. A few years back I had some discussions with Peter Ralph while he and Graham Coop were putting together their manuscript for The Geography of Recent Genetic Ancestry across Europe. Peter told me that once the manuscript was put on a preprint server he’d email me so I could check it out. What happened is that 1) the preprint went up 2) within one hour people were talking about it on Twitter 3) within two hours I had put up a blog post about it. Peter emailed me to laugh about the fact that he was about to tell me that the preprint was up when he saw that I had already written a blog post about it.
Obviously not all aspects of the academic production process can be accelerated in this manner. But there are now steps in the reaction where there is very little friction, and the latency can be pretty much abolished. The internet introduced us to “Netscape time”, but it doesn’t seem that many aspects of science have changed much since the universal penetration of the internet….