I’ve just been invited to edit a special issue in the MDPI journal ‘publications‘ on a topic I can specify. If I do it, I thought it should revolve around replacing journal rank (i.e., altmetrics, ALM, etc.) and other (technical?) means to transcend a journal-based literature towards a coherent knowledge-dissemination infrastructure that incorporates of course text, but also software and data. Perhaps some topics could be: modern assessment and quality control methodology; open research data management, archiving and integration; management of scientific software; integration of text, software and data; authoring technology. What is the current state of the art and what is most likely to be developed in the near future, what are people working on right now?
However, I’m a little hesitant as I don’t have any experience with the publisher nor the journal. I can see that Heather Morrison has published in there, but that’s about it.
I also wonder as to which authors would be interested in contributing what to such a special issue?
What do you think, should I do it? Do you think anybody would be interesting in reading these articles? If so, would you be interested in contributing? Then let me know in the comments. Please feel free to circulate this request wherever you see fit. I’m not sure I’m the right guy, but I’d let myself be convinced to try it anyway 🙂
UPDATE: I’ve now read some conflicting information about the publisher. On the one hand, Grant Steen is organizing a special topic on misconduct in the same journal, on the other hand, there are a number of truly outrageous stories for some papers in other journals. I guess one can see this as the usual mix any publisher is offering? 🙂 I mean, let the publisher without any outrageously insane papers cast the first stone 🙂
UPDTAE2: Awesome, people are sending me all kinds of information. I just learned of another cool special issue in this journal on open access (via Heinz Pampel). Two authors have so far also volunteered to contribute in case it happens.
