Ok, now that Apoorva has left, I guess we’ll need to blog more to keep Spoonful of Medicine alive. So, let’s get things started with a brief mention of this month’s Nature Medicine editorial.

In it, we imagine a world in which scientists could publish no more than 20 papers throughout their whole careers as a means to reduce scientific “inflation” — the huge proliferation of scientific papers and journals, many of which add very little or even nothing to scientific knowledge.

If we adopted this 20-paper rule, many articles reporting incremental advances would no longer be written, and many specialized journals would disappear. And with far fewer papers to read, each one reporting a much more complete piece of research, search committees or funding bodies could directly evaluate the work of a given scientist, instead of leaning on surrogate indicators such as a journal’s impact factor or number of citations, “evil” numbers that many of researchers love to hate.

We may not even need journals (and editors) anymore; everything would be published in preprint servers like those used by physicists, and the community would simply evaluate and rank the different contributions as they become available. This way, the whole community could act as reviewers, doing away with the existing peer-review process, another favorite target of many disgruntled scientists.

Of course, the key issue is whether you, as a working scientist, would agree to the 20-paper rule for the sake of cleaning up the scientific literature and improving on the peer-review process. Any takers?