Journal for the Twitter Generation of Researchers

Journals can be found for almost every branch or sub-branch of science, their databases and even for negative results. However, there’s one area that has been ignored all this while, a journal to publish minute single repeatable observations. A Swiss is set out to change that, with Matters, a journal that publishes the minutest properly conducted observations.

Tired of the publish or perish model putting restrictions on publications and pointing fingers on the sincerity of researchers, Lawrence Rajendran formed the journal to provide a platform where important observations can be quickly published. At the same time providing a boost to researcher integrity who is no longer under pressure to over emphasize and alter his or her findings to make it attractive for high impact journals to publish.

Calling observations as the pillars of science, Rajendran and his team at Matters are setting out to reward a researcher’s curiosity, leaving someone else to publish the conclusion. Matters will be open source, with 500 submissions free for a researcher, after which $150 will be charged to the university per submission. The founders of the journal have also tried to make it easier to publish and review with an online editor that borrows aspects from Latex, word and photoshop. Review process is triple-bind process and designed to be quick so that a submission is published either in Matters or Matterselect, a sister journal for considerably important submissions.

Rajendran gives the example of a researcher in Africa who is able to show, with proper controls and statistics, that an extract from eucalyptus bark relieves pain under certain conditions, which currently can’t be published in a good journal, leaving it to languish in lab notebooks.

Link: Matters

Matters, the next-generation science journal for single observations from Sciencematters on Vimeo.