Science 2.0?

This year I am running several conferences and it has caused me to ask this question: can science move faster? Today most scientists have far more compute power (peta-flops) than they did a few years ago and yet the many scientific processes are no faster than before. For example last year (2007) I had my very first 2009 publication. Thats right in 2009 a year from now a journal paper that was written in 2006 will come out, so is science really keeping up with other related progresses?

This year I am part of two conferences InfoScale (The Third International ICST Conference on Scalable Information Systems) and CIKM (ACM 17th Conference on Information and Knowledge Management). A typical conference has a 3-4 month lag between a paper submission to publication. Does that seem like a reasonable time period to wait for the latest ideas? Compare that to a blog or wiki that the publication that is instantaneous. I am on the editorial board for JASIST, a well respected journal, we see submissions to final publication taking a year or more.  Both of these examples (conferences and journals) were fine in the days of postal mailing manuscripts back and forth.  But today, we have the communication means to speed this process up and change it for the better. 

A friend of mine Ben Shneiderman just recently published a paper in Science called "Science 2.0" where he made the argument that we should be studying the interactions of people "collaborations and contributions" rather than the interaction of particles. For the few of you that clicked on the article you will find that it is not accessible, unless you pay.  Again, it is not technology that is slowing us down, but an out of date publishing business model. For those of you that still want a feel of the paper here is the Wired coverage of that paper "The Internet Is Changing the Scientific Method". 

I write this, not because I have an answer, but to see if others do on this growing problem. We are changing the ways we share ideas because the barriers of communication are dropping. For science to continue to grow and thrive we must remove the barriers from that process as well.  That means we need to seriously rethink the peer review process and publication paradigms we have in place. Think in terms of wiki style publications that give authors the credit for their ideas but still allow us to collaborate together. Lets take some pointers from companies like Amazon that by opening up their API they got 100k developers working on their stuff or Netflix that opened up their data and got hundreds of researchers looking at their problems. Perhaps following in those models we can get Science working at a realistic pace and start to see real peta-collaborations in the world of science.