Image via Wikipedia Last Friday I spoke at the STM Innovation Seminar in London, taking in general terms the theme I’ve been developing recently of focussing on enabling user discovery rather than providing central filtering, of enabling people to act as their own gatekeeper rather than publishers taking that role on for themselves.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post looking at the announcement of Nature Communications, a new journal from Nature Publishing Group that will be online only and have an open access option. Grace Baynes, fromthe  NPG communications team kindly offered to get some of the questions raised in that piece answered and I am presenting my questions and the answers from NPG here in their complete form.

I, and many others have spent the last week thinking about Wave and I have to say that I am getting more, rather than less, excited about the possibilities that this represents. All of the below will have to remain speculation for the moment but I wanted to walk through two use cases and identify how the concept of a collaborative automated document will have an impact.

There are a set of memes that seem to be popping up with increasing regularity in the last few weeks. The first is that more of the outputs of scientific research need to be published. Sometimes this means the publication of negative results, other times it might mean that a community doesn’t feel they have an outlet for their particular research field. The traditional response to this is “we need a journal” for this.