Anastomosis is defined as the connection of separate parts of a branching system to form a network, as of leaf veins, blood vessels, or a river and its branches.
Anastomosis a project to develop a peer-reviewed journal, operated by a decentralized network of volunteer scientists whom carefully select not yet published research, essays and journalism related to the broad subject of networks. Topics within the subject of network science can be from any discipline from computer science topics such as computer networks, decentralized software, cryptocurrency to biology topics such as mycology and neuroscience.
Anastomosis utilizes an open submission system, encouraging everyone from unpublished hackers exploring to published researchers to participate.
Anastomosis falls into a category of scientific literature often called "gray literature", a term used to describe a wide variety of literature that is not published by traditional commercial, academic publishing.
Do we need another scientific journal? Anastomosis seeks to provide zero cost open science publishing for citizen scientists, hackers, and researchers "without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself."
Free and open peer-reviewed publishing removes all possible barriers to publishing open science for citizen scientist, hackers and researchers. Existing open access science can be expensive to cover publication cost, one publisher lists "Fees range from $500 to $5,000 US Dollars.", for citizen scientist spending their money
Acknowledging both the successes and the failures of the current academic publishing model we believe that more change can be made by introducing a new open standard, building open source publishing tools and creating high quality publications using these the new standards to test their efficacy.
We believe a new open standard can be used to define a subset of "gray literature" that we would like to be called "open research publishing". It is an open standard, meaning there is no single definition and interpretations vary with usage. The three key ideas of open research publishing are transparency, public availability or usability and public accessibility.
Open research publishing is the open standard actively being defined by participants publishing open access research. The standard seeks to address the common problems associated gray literature publications, to increase quality and longevity of accessibility.
A minimum requirement must be established that allows anonymous publications while providing enough information to provide meaningful bibliographic control.
An open standard for formatting and layouts must be established that present published work in line with existing trends in professional publications. Open and free layouts which meet this standard must be made available.
All publications under the open research standard must us free and open electronic publishing formats such as EPUB.
A variety of methods to address problems with longevity and provide permanent archival of publications will need to be developed. Development of open source tools using blockchains, mainline DHT, or new peer-to-peer software to both archive and guarantee accessibility. Peer-to-peer solutions should be used alongside existing systems like or academic institutions who could be partnered with to store open research publications. Operating as a decentralized organization will help address some of the problems with longevity that electronic publishers can be subject to.
To resolve issues of longevity related to link-rot, a persistent unique identification system must be used that can be updated if the URL changes . Development of an open decentralized identifier system utilizing a DHT or leveraging blockchains is preferred but until a reliable open source identifier system can be implemented all articles published under the open research standard must be assigned a [digital object identifier DOI.
All articles published should be accessible "without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet itself."
This may be accomplished using a variety of methods from releasing the articles as public domain or using standard licenses like Creative Commons Attribution License.
An open source peer-to-peer database with search must be made available. Different publications using the software could federate to strengthen their network.
The open standard guidelines are evolving, the Anastomosis Journal will be used as a testing grounds for the concepts and provide insight on what open source tools are needed.
As more scientists recognize the role of open source software on the advancement of computer science, increasingly scientists in other scientific disciplines are becoming interested in the concept of open science and associated topics. A growing amount of resources are being available to scientists, researchers and publishers interested in open science; anyone interested in open science should familiarize themselves with the existing resources.
- https://centerforopenscience.org/
- https://www.plos.org/open-access
- https://osf.io/
- https://okfn.org/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Commons
- http://www.citizencyberscience.net/
- http://www.citizensciencecenter.com/
- http://www.ibercivis.com/
- http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/
- http://english.eu2016.nl/documents/reports/2016/04/04/amsterdam-call-for-action-on-open-science
- https://experiment.com/
- http://precedings.nature.com/documents/1526/version/1
- https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/open-science-open-access
- http://www.nwo.nl/en/policies/open+science