Nature seeing a trend?

Although the pace of science often seems glacial, returning from the Beyond the PDF2 meeting, I have been struck at how much scientific publishing has changed in the last 18 months, since the first beyond the pdf meeting.

Not many scientific meetings really are transformative, so this one has been a rare gem in the great sea of 'same old'. It seems that major publishers (most present at the meeting), have also started to pay attention.

This week Nature has used its influence to comment on this very issue in the form of various editorials.

They address open access to the scientific literature, which was a big topic of conversation at the last beyond the pdf, a topic conspicuously absent this time. Open access is here, we need to still work out some kinks, as Nature is pointing out, but essentially it is solved. Ok, perhaps not solved, especially if you are talking about access by machines (e.g., statistical algorithms) and publication costs are still too high for the humanities and those in the third world, but as a topic of conversation as to whether we should have access, the jury is in and implementation awaits. So now that anyone will have access to an increasing quantity of the world's publications, what now?

My read of the next steps are largely what the meeting kept oscillating between: data vs prose. The data side seems to believe that if we can have data as a publication because prose is a highly imperfect way of communicating about data. We could now have access to everyone's raw data and then all will be well? The other side (including the advocacy for the pen and paper) also has an interesting point, it turns out that the human species has evolved to communicate by using language, not statistical inference.

My analysis of this meeting is: Yes you will have access to the scientific literature, but the problem of data is far from solved, in fact the problem of data is only now starting to be considered. I do not sit on the sidelines of this discussion, at NIF we have data, compare data from different sources, but even so, I wonder if the lack of prose will be as great a problem as all prose.