Making a name for yourself in science is no easy job. Aside from the technical challenge of doing noteworthy science while working under constraints, there's the compounding challenge of making your work known to influential colleagues. Excellent work done in a vacuum is lost to science, only to be "rediscovered" by those more willing or capable of self-promotion. Look around at the most successful scientists in your field, and you'll find that they are both extraordinarily adept at doing noteworthy science and in promoting their work.

Scientists have been using the scientific publication system for hundreds of years as a channel for promoting their work. For a variety of reasons, this system is now breaking down before our eyes. There are many reasons - consider these:

• The printed page doesn't matter anymore. Old-guard scientific publishers have been able to prosper by acting as gatekeepers of a precious resource: the printed page. The arrival of immediate, ultra-cheap, ubiquitous, interactive, and persistent communication through the Internet means that printed journals are increasingly viewed as wasteful and irrelevant.

• Printed journals have priced themselves out of the marketplace. How many printed journals has your library dropped over the last year? Does your "library" even carry current printed journals anymore?

• Electronic Information wants to be free. Few things are more frustrating than knowing the answer to your question exists on a server somewhere, but you are forbidden from accessing it. Yes, you can pay $15-$30 for each article you need or get multiple subscriptions costing thousands per year, but is that any way to spend your budget?

• The minimum publishable unit is shrinking. Scientists have legitimate interests in maximizing the number of papers they publish, in minimizing their size, and in decreasing their interval. Submissions to top-tier journals continue to increase. New journals are started to catch the overflow, placing additional strain on the system's ability to find readers and "qualified" reviewers, and driving up production costs in the process.

• Too much information. How many scientific papers have you actually read, from start to finish, in the last month? How many important, relevant papers in your field could you have completely read in the last month? How many of them did you find through an automatic notification system? How many papers have you used solely for one specific piece of information they contain? How many of these papers did you find through a database of some kind?

Open Access has become a hot topic, mainly in response to the points above. Although well-intended, the debate assumes that scientific publication in the Internet age will continue to work essentially the same way it always has - with scientists submitting manuscripts to publishers who act as editors, distributors, and in many cases quality-assurance agencies.

But what if it doesn't end up working out that way?

The reason that the existing scientific publication system has flourished for hundreds of years is that it solved the fundamental problems of two key groups: (1) scientists who wanted to be informed of new developments; and (2) scientists who wanted to promote their work and careers.

If you accept this premise, then nothing prevents entirely new publication models from replacing the existing ones - provided that they solve the basic problem scientists face. If anything, the Internet is replete with examples of powerful old-guard gatekeepers of all stripes being first undermined as they denied that their business models were failing, then lashing out at everything but the root cause of their problems, and finally being driven into oblivion.

Why should old-guard scientific publishers be immune to this process?

Some scientists are discovering value in bypassing scientific publishers altogether. In chemistry, the best-known example is Jean-Claude Bradley and his group at Drexel. As Bradley's group is joined by others willing to experiment in this area, they will uncover a variety of problems that need to be addressed. Some of the most significant (at this point) include:

• tools to create content

• services that host and archive that content indefinitely

• peer-review mechanisms that fully leverage the power of collaboration over the Internet

• utilities for finding and promoting the work

These are the new high-payoff areas in scientific publication. Like all high-payoff areas, this one starts out looking dangerous or insignificant to most people.

This is not to say that that the Internet eliminates the need for gatekeepers. Instead, it creates tremendous opportunities for new gatekeepers. Google, eBay, and Wikipedia are gatekeepers. Facebook and YouTube are also gatekeepers. By all accounts, these services have done phenomenally well and will continue to flourish for some time. Significantly, each service addresses the basic need of information consumers to be informed and information producers to have their message heard. These systems have found powerful mechanisms for quality control that in many cases put the current practice of scientific peer-review to shame. And in no case will you find a business model requiring pay-per-view.

Google, eBay, Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, and hundreds of other gatekeepers thrive because each has found a new precious resource to allocate, not by trying to extract every last drop of value from the old ones. Both scientific publishers and Open Access proponents would be wise to consider their example.

Image Credit: Seamus Murray

Why do scientists publish? There is a myth - common among non-scientists - that scientists publish their work mainly out of an altruistic desire to make the world a better place. Sharing their work helps science move faster and that's a Good Thing. This is, of course, an important factor for most scientists. At least it's hard to imagine any scientist seriously thinking that they want their work to be used to make the world worse off.

The problem with the altruism myth is that it obscures many of the deeper reasons that scientists publish.

Recently, I attended a talk given by Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal, on the subject of product design. In it, he advised those seeking to create a successful startup to build products designed to enable users to commit one or more of the Seven Deadly Sins.

His reasoning was simplicity itself. The Seven Deadly Sins were those activities so universal, that people needed to be threatened with all kinds of bad things if they did them. Looking at it from a detached, secular perspective, most people seem hard-wired to want to commit one or more of the Seven Deadly Sins - repeatedly and without encouragement. Looking at it from a product designer perspective, cha-ching!

Levchin went on to observe that people can commit every one of the Seven Deadly Sins on the Web - except for gluttony. Thus, the popularity of the Internet as a venue for doing business.

It may seem a little odd at first, but can this reasoning be applied to scientific publication? How many of the Seven Deadly sins does publishing satisfy? Does this offer any insight into the deeper reasons scientists publish their work?

Below, I offer some ideas on the Seven Deadly Sins as they apply to scientific publication:

• Greed The flip-side of "Publish or Perish" is "Publish and Prosper". We're not talking about directly profiting from scientific publication (only scientific publishers do that). No, we're talking about using a publication record to build a reputation. It's that reputation that in turn leads to funded grant proposals, scheduled job interviews, lucrative offers from recruiters, raises, bonuses, and promotions. If science is a business, then publications are it's currency.

• Envy Don't get left out. Few things are more jarring than to suddenly realize that your publication record is far below average.

• Pride Finish a job well-done. Doing science the right way is hard work. It can involve both skilled experimental technique and ingenious insights. Why not cap off that achievement by letting the world know how it was done and how you got there first?

• Wrath Stick it to someone who deserves it. Or, just tear to pieces an idea that's plain wrong. Scientists as dispassionate observers? Not always.

• Gluttony Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess. Remember Dr. Soandso who publishes way too many (perhaps low-quality) papers? The rise in popularity of the Communication shows he's not alone. Who could blame him or anyone else, given what's at stake?

• Sloth N/A. Actually, it takes the mighty pull of the other sins on this list to overcome the mental barrier to drafting a manuscript and getting it publication-ready.

• Lust Depends on how you define it. See "Gluttony" and "Greed".

Depending on definitions, at least five of the Seven Deadly Sins factor into scientists' motivations for publishing. Notice that despite the term "Sin", not all of these motivations are malevolent. Scientists should take pride in their work, they need to feed themselves and their families, nobody likes to be left behind, sometimes it really is better to write three Communications than one long paper, and some things are worth getting mad about.

Why does any of this matter? For the simple reason that information technology and economics are in the process of rendering obsolete existing models of scientific publication. To build the systems of the future, it's essential to understand the motivations of those using the current one.