It's Time: We're Open for Submissions.

It's been a few months since Draw Science's "open access journal" was fully funded on Experiment. Today, we're excited to announce we're open for submissions. However, a lot has changed since then (so read on).

For starters, it's not an open access, infographic journal. It's an open, graphical publishing platform.

You: What the hell does that mean?

I just reached home a week ago after 3 months of travelling through Europe. During this period, I met with many science communicators seeking advice and feedback on the model for Draw Science's publishing. The original idea was to offer scientists a graphical publication with an appendix that would include all the standard information found in a normal scholarly publication.

The Problem

Draw Science works fine as an independently-run blog; not so much as a scholarly journal. Scientists have no incentive to write their papers twice (once for the graphic, once for a standard paper) and the general public has no interest in reading an academic journal. In short, the idea of Draw Science as a journal would attract no readership or submissions.

The Advice

"What you're doing is working, so stick to it." The overwhelming advice was to continue illustrating existing publications, but the challenge was to involve scientists and publishers in the process. The goal in shifting to a DOI-assigned, archived model was to spur change in mainstream science communication: graphical communication must become a core part of scholarly publishing. The answer started with Luc Henry of Hackuarium. As Séverine Trouilloud of L'Eprouvette, Luc, and myself attempted to wrangle the core of the problem in science communication & outreach, he answered with one word: incentive.

We need to incentivize effective science communication. Scientists have no reason to care about reaching out to laypeople: they live in a world of "publish-or-perish" where only citation counts and metrics matter. So, Draw Science will give them just that--for the same amount of work.

The Solution

Draw Science will partner with journals and individual authors to offer a graphical abstract & summary service. For each article, we will create a small graphical abstract, which when clicked, will hyperlink to a complete, DOI-assigned graphical summary that cites the original article.

It's a win-win-win: Journals get to add a graphical abstract feature without hiring an expensive in-house designer. Scientists start with a citation count of one and better altmetrics (thanks to the incomparable traffic of mass media). Laypeople get fresh-from-the-lab-bench science both from Draw Science, and journalists who draw upon our graphical summaries or even reuse them (they will be available under Creative Commons).

Individual authors can use Draw Science as a service for one of their papers as well and simply have to caption their graphical abstract with a hyperlink to the full summary.

What Now?

We need interested journals and individual scientists! We want to help publishers grow their reach and spread science. Draw Science will bridge the gap between scholarly science publication and lay-person audiences. Let's revolutionize science communication, together.