Sustainability in the management of scientific information
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NOTE AND COMMENT
Sustainability in the management of scientific information Miguel Ángel Medina1,2,3 Received: 19 April 2020 / Accepted: 11 September 2020 © Springer Japan KK, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The sustainability in the management of scientific information is becoming compromised in this new age of Big Data. Herein, I present and discuss some of the main challenges of this situation in both scientific practice and scientific communication. A major challenge is trying to fill the growing gap between the rate at which new data accumulated and the rate at which these yield new knowledge. Another major challenge is the current hypertrophy of science publications contributing to the Red Queen effect in the scientific activity and to the "publish or perish" policy. All the previously mentioned circumstances contribute to the imposition of urgency and immediacy in the practice of science, leaving too little time to reflect what, why, and how we are researching. Keywords Big data · Moore’s law · Red queen effect · Slow science
Introduction: the growing gap Mankind is in the midst of the Big Data era. This objective fact is a source of new opportunities but, at the same time, it confronts us with new risks and uncertainties. In a sea of data, how can we navigate safely without getting lost? In recent years a huge amount of data is being collected and converted into digital formats. According to Moore’s law of data, 90% of the data available in the world today was created/obtained in the last two years. This avalanche of data is causing the growing gap in human knowledge: the increasing speed with which data is accumulated increases the gap between the accumulated data and the amount of it that is converted into information, and even more the gap with the amount of accumulated knowledge. Handled by Alexander Gonzalez Flor, University of the Philippines Open University Faculty of Information and Communication Studies, Philippines. * Miguel Ángel Medina [email protected] 1
Departamento de Biología Molecular y Bioquímica, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Málaga, Andalucía Tech, 29071 Málaga, Spain
2
IBIMA (Biomedical Research Institute of Málaga), 29071 Málaga, Spain
3
CIBER de Enfermedades Raras (CIBERER), 29071 Málaga, Spain
In the last 50 years, Biology has grown enormously. Currently, it has become a frontier science contributing to the growth of Big Data. In what follows, and based on the experience and perspective that I have gained from 35 years of work as a researcher in the field of biological sciences, I would like to share with the readers a series of personal reflections on how the accumulation of data in scientific practice and in the communication of science is becoming one of the great challenges and one of the main risks for the progress of scientific activity itself.
The hypertrophy of scientific publications I am not referring here to the problem of the proliferation of pirate publishers offering thousands of supposedly scientific journals that publish anything. Let us
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