Picking up on the Nature Structural and Molecular Biology Editorial “New data at conferences, please”, discussed here last week, Mario Pineda-Krch writes on his blog (Mario’s Entangled Bank) about how the idea of the conference as a type of open peer-review process reminds him of the 1997 essay The academic Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond.

In the Cathedral model the research process occurs behind closed doors among a exclusive group of researchers where progress is reported in peer-reviewed publications. In the Bazaar model the research is conducted in full view of the public……The basic tenet of the Bazaar model has in the field of software development termed Linus’ law, i.e. “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”. In an academic research environment the pros of the Bazaar model hinge on the fact that the more widely available the your research methodology and results is for public testing, scrutiny, and experimentation, the more rapidly all forms of errors and omissions will be discovered. In contrast, in the Cathedral model an inordinate amount of time and energy must be spent hunting for errors due to the limited number of eyeballs.

Mario, a postdoctoral researcher who works on ecological population dynamics at the University of California, Davis, believes that “academia would be a better place if more people would embrace this type of openness. Maybe the conferences setting could be the natural stage where the Bazaar movement could start.”