Will the launch of the first Twitter-only journal, publishing original peer-reviewed research direct to the reader, take off?

Last week, I received a tweet from @janremm who was midway through a conversation – on Twitter – about how to cite tweets within academic research. She was talking with @jotaigna, who asked in what way a tweet could be a valuable source to support a (scientific) argument. I think it it’s fair to say he was sceptical.

But why couldn’t this be possible? I haven’t done it before, but I have utilised tweets as sources. I wrote something on tweeting the Olympics last year, referencing the case of Tom Daley’s Twitter troll. A crucial element of my argument was that, had Tom not retweeted the abuse he received, it would not have made headline news. In this case, citing the tweet in my work made perfect sense, but I was not using it as an academic source, just as data.

This recent conversation stemmed from @janremm tweeting newly published guidelines on how to cite a tweet from the Modern Language Association. This organisation wasn’t the first to define its Twitter citation standards and there is not yet one universally accepted method, but the fact that academics are citing tweets at all says something about publishing and the public sphere.

I wonder what would have happened had Einstein tweeted E=mc2 or Rosalind Franklin had first shared her presentation of DNA on Slideshare. Would she have received more credit for her contribution? Would she have been more able to protect her intellectual property? Would the world have been a better place for her work getting out there before the publisher could turn it around?

These questions get to the heart of how publishing is changing in academia. Many publishers have already mobilised to respond to the rapidly changing world online. Open access publishing is on the rise, online first publishing is growing, and journals are beginning to disseminate original content though their social media presence. For instance, @katonutella at Taylor & Francis’s Journal of Sports Sciences (@JSportsSci) set up “twinterviews” with its editors, giving exclusive insight into getting published by the journalthat you won’t find elsewhere.

For many years, debate around the internet and academic publishing has focused on whether it is a credible destination for quality work. Some people remain wedded to the idea that journals are physical tomes imbued with certain qualities that give them prestige and importance – their history and reputation perhaps. Increasingly though, we are investing trust into new platforms to tell us what is happening in the world and what matters.

A Twitter-only journal?

Twitter doesn’t always do this, but it does it enough. We keep being told that highly tweeted papers are more highly cited than those less shared on social media. We hear constantly about the demise of print and the rows around open access. Why not take your work direct to the user and publish it on Twitter? And with article metrics increasingly more significant than journal metrics, Twitter metrics seem like a natural development.

This is why it makes sense to create a Twitter-only journal, which would publish original, peer-reviewed research, direct to the reader. And that is what I have done: introducing the world’s first Twitter journal of academic research, aka @TwournalOf. Part philosophical provocation, part genuine intervention, I want to explore the willingness of researchers to share their original findings in a new format.

Consider the article you are working on right now. You’ve probably already thought about where you might submit it. However, getting published is only half the battle these days. Your university will want you to demonstrate impact around the publication and to do that you need to build a community around the work, perhaps even before it is published. You need a public engagement strategy that allows you to reach more people and eventually have a bigger impact with your findings.

Our twournal is a new step in that direction, a place where researchers can publish their original findings. There’s still a lot to figure out, of course. Should the journal have a publisher backing it? Probably. Publishers do a lot more than just get your work out there. They provide an ecosystem in which it can flourish, with legal, technical, and strategic vision. What sorts of subjects should we focus on publishing? Who will own the copyright? Will it be exclusive?

The Twournal could evolve its focus based on the demographics of its followers, taken from data available in Twitter, to tailor what it publishes to that group, while tagging tweets with subject hashtags to allow greater clarity on points of interest. And how will peer review work? If a tweeted article obtains 20 short peer-reviews that all say the article is worthy of publication, is this any less valuable than three longer reviews which exhibit greater equivocation?

Another link in the chain

Any Twitter journal also needs to figure out its place in the publishing chain. Presently, it works a bit like this:

1. Do the research
2. Speak about it at a conference
3. Submit it to a journal
4. Publish a working paper online
5. Get accepted by a journal and publish an online first version
6. Publish to digital
7. Publish to print
8. Tweet about it

Twournal inverts the chain, starting with the tweet, but we have to figure out whether that tweet replaces the 5,000 word article or whether it can become a format in its own right that conveys an appropriate level of depth. Publishing to Twitter could precede online first publication, a kind of teaser for fuller publication. The tweet might become the first step towards a more fleshed-out process, the end of which is the publication of your dataset. But evidence shows that those studies which publish their raw data – a growing trend – are also more highly cited.

If you are wondering how to condense your 5,000 word article into 140 characters, bear in mind the following. The brevity of format does not determine the degree of truth it can convey. We just need to develop better conventions to pack more into a tweet than we do presently. You can already attach a video or an image to a tweet. How much more might be possible with the right attachments, annotations and language?

What distinguishes this publishing era from previous ones is that protocols are crowdsourced by the wider community. All systems require some time to perfect, but the twournal offers a different system of reviewing, publishing, and valuing work that may just cohere with the way our attention economy is developing. As the volume of journal articles published doubles every 20 years, we need to give this serious consideration.

What do you make of @TwournalOf? Share your views and suggestions for development in the comments below

Andy Miah is professor in ethics and emerging technologies at the University of the West of Scotland – follow him on Twitter @andymiah

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