Publish or Push?

In an effort to prompt one of my fellow colleagues into working more on his research, my supervised made a comment along the lines of "you may have many great ideas in your thesis, but unless you publish them, only about three people on the planet will know about them". Although the comment was somewhat facetious, this immediately got my cogs turning, as I too have published little from my thesis at this stage, although I have pushed many of my ideas out in the form of small reusable technical reports.

I am a major advocate of getting ideas out at any cost, particularly with regard to personal attribution or first-pass correctness taking a back seat. The thing I think is great about peer-review is that many eyes make the bug pool shallow, and when institutionalised it means humans a forced to sit down and at the very least read your ponderings, and at best pick through your arguments and findings. Unfortunately, from my limited perspective the so-called 'standardisation of quality' promoted by the process is somewhat lacking, specifically with regard to my readings in computer science (without naming names, I read broadly across themes in artificial intelligence). On the one had I see publication spamming as a mechanism for academic empire building (an axiom of the scholarly method and aggressive extension of 'publish or perish') and a revenue stream for large publishing houses. On the other hand, I suspect the mediocrity of the majority published work is caused by the shear volume of annual contributors, the effect this has on expanding the pool of reviewers, the monetary incentives for publishing houses to accommodate the size of the market, and the diverse state of computer science education and promoted research methods.

Anyway, all of that aside, there are plenty of avenues for pushing ideas out beyond 'feeding the machine'. Specifically, there are open access options and pre-print archives that promote dissemination of information, obviously, there are technical reports, and more interestingly, there is the increasing trend of academic blogging. I equate of this last point in terms of the researchers of yesteryear keeping notebooks and writing letters (often posthumously published). In particular the openness of website or a blog (public by default) and searchability of the web make this previously private commentary available on demand.

Two things I have observed with this is everyone (the new and the old school of academics) hits Google (or equivalent) for a first pass instead of the library or search on the publishing houses websites, and the creditability of results is still assessed by the conventional peer-reviewed publishing houses standards. This means you can push all your crazy ideas out there, people will find them, although they are (generally) only trusted if you can back them up with some kind of publication. It is generally the case where seminal white papers or technical reports are supplanted with journal papers a number of years later.

Two excellent examples that came out of a discussion with a colleague (Dan) regarding this point on credibility. The first was Wikipedia that is used as a general 'first port of call' for general information although is criticised against the old standards for generally being written by anonymous non-experts and therefore has a low creditability. The second example was that of the recent trend in publishing albums on line, the first case with Radiohead with a proven (classical) track record (creditable and with existing fan base) whose album In Rainbows was an online success, and Saul Williams (as helped by Reznor who with NIN later 'pulled a Radiohead'), who had no such credibility and was not a success.

The point is I think that the on demand availability of information will clobber the conventional standards of evaluation, where it will be the amount of information disseminated and amount of reuse (PageRank? or Whuffie?) that will define future credibility of pushed research (scale or scope of reuse defining the discrete usefulness). This is simply an on-demand (dynamic) re-phrasing of the classical source evaluation and citation system in print media. If that is the case, then surely Google is on the right track.