Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

Google has recently released knol, which most people are calling Google’s version of Wikipedia. The main difference between a knol and a wikipedia article is that a knol has associated authorship or ownership against an article. This factor has caused some issues an outcries focusing on the merits of the wisdom of crowds verses the merits of single individuals and the whole ethos if information dissemination on the Web. (There are too many to cite but some discussion can be found on FriendFeed+knol)

However, on looking at knol and having a snoop around I was not drawn into thinking about competing with Wikipedia or advertising revenue, rather what struck me is that a knol, with owner authorship looks incredibly like a scientific journal publication platform…

According to the Introduction to knol (or instructions for authors)  you to can write about anything you like, so disseminiation of science must fall under that. You can collaborate on a unit of knowledge (or manuscript) with other authors and they are listed – I assume the contribution to the text will also be stored in the revision history, makes the authors contribution section a little easier to write. It is not limited to one article per subject, so this allows all manner of opinions or scientific findings to be reported contrasted and compared with each other. You can select your copyright and license for your article (rather than handing it over). You can request a (peer-) review of the article, However more important the article is available for continuous peer-review in the form of comments on the article.

So is a knol a Google Wikipedia or is it a scientific publishing platform? What would prevent publishiing a knol and getting credit (hyperlinks), citations (analytics) impact factors (page ranks) in the same way you do for the traditional scientific publishers? You would of course not have to pay for the privilage of trying to diseminate your findings, loosing copyright and then asking your institution to pay for a subscription so you and your lab members can read your own articles. In fact you, as an author (lab, institution) can even share revenue for your article via adsense.

Some traditional publishers are trying to embrace new mechanisms of disseminating scientific knowledge. Only today Nature Reviews Genetics (as described by Nacsent) published the paper Towards a cyberinfrastructure for the biological sciences: progress, visions and challenges by Lincoln Stein and published the supplementary material as a community editable wiki.

With knol as a scientific publishing platform, what can the traditional scientific publishing houses now offer for the publishing fees? Faster turn around? revenue sharing? Are they really still the gatekeepers of scientific knowledge? Or in the Web 2.0 era has that mantle passed to Google? Certainly, in the first instance it would make a nice preceedings platform.