Thank you to all those who attended tonight's discussion. Also an additional thank you to the other panelists and moderator. To those who were not able to attend, please feel free to join in on our dialog.

One of the goals of tonight’s discussion was to see what issues regarding scientific publishing, if any, resonate within the community. In this respect, the meeting was a great success. Close to 100 members of the Caltech community attended with the discussion continuing well over 2 hours after the initial presentation ended. Some issues that were brought up include: increasing access to published papers, encouraging authors to retain copyright of their work, making peer review more open and transparent, new ways of assessing scientific merit, and post-publication review.

We were fortunate to have some members of the audience who have made previous attempts at improving scholarly publication. Richard Flagan referred me to a proposal for a "New Model for Scholarly Communication" which he co-authored in 1999, and it turns out Zoltan Nadasdy proposed and wrote code for an pseudo-unsupervised electronic journal 10 years ago this month.

In light of these past efforts, I agree with Gilles Laurent’s suggestion to start the next discussion by seeing what we can learn from the successes and failures of projects such as Richard’s and Zoltan’s. From there perhaps we can begin to draft a new plan of action.

In the mean time we can use this forum to continue the conversation. I encourage you to weigh in on issues that interest you, post links to relevant information, and if an article can be found in PubMed, to add it to this group. I’ve already added a brief correspondence by Eagleman and Holcombe on post-publication review.

Let's keep the fire burning!