Research universities need excellent means to communicate and express their results to regular people.
In general, science journalism concerns itself with what has been published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals - Nature, Cell, The New England Journal of Medicine - which set the agenda.
I was talking to my dad, who's a neurosurgeon. He had this academic paper he wanted to publish. Journals take about 18 months to publish a paper, and he just wanted to get things up there.
Every paper published in a respectable journal should have a preface by the author stating why he is publishing the article, and what value he sees in it. I have no hope that this practice will ever be adopted.
I think a lot of journal articles should really be blogs.
The agriculture ministry has to see that their good research percolates down to the fields through the state agricultural departments and the 70-odd state agricultural universities.
No academic ever expects to be taken seriously by more than three other people, because really, we write for three people in our field.
Sci-Hub arose as a tool to be used in a Russian-speaking online research community.
Teaching needs an ecosystem that supports evidence-based practice. It will need better systems to disseminate the results of research more widely, but also a better understanding of research, so that teachers can be critical consumers of evidence.
If you are a responsible scientist, you are going to present your new results in a paper, and maybe if, over time, things are established, and it's prime time for the public to hear about it, then you include it in a book.
The value of a scientific publication goes beyond this simple benefit, of all relevant information appearing, unambiguously, in one place. It's also a way to communicate your ideas to your scientific peers, and invite them to express an informed view.
Unfortunately, there is something of a flaw in this idealized picture of the way the scientific community discovers truth. And the flaw is that most scientific work never gets noticed. Study after study has shown that most scientific papers are read by almost no one, while a small number of papers are read by many people.
Science is not finished until it is communicated.
