In a world where it’s “Publish or Perish,” you’d expect “publish” to be the more favorable option.

But, if you’ve ever spent a year or more performing experiments, crafting figures, writing a manuscript, finding a friendly editor and arguing with reviewers, that “perish” option might just sound pretty sweet right about now….

It’s no secret that the publishing industry has an inexplicable choke-hold on the scientific community. A handful of companies exercise editorial control, deciding which findings are permitted to enter the information stream. They charge the researcher who submits the paper, then charge exorbitant fees to the reader to see what was ‘printed.’

While the information age has flooded nearly every aspect of our daily lives, its transformative power sometimes seems to be walled off at the laboratory door.

Luckily, there are a few scientists who are willing to chip away at that wall.

Minimum Viable Publication

Nate Jacobs wasn’t far into his postdoctoral training when he realized that the joy of publishing a paper had faded.

Nate Jacobs, PhDCEO of Flashpub

“I started getting really frustrated with the publishing process. Every time I published, it kind of felt like a failure. I wasn’t sure if other people would be able to reproduce it. It didn’t feel collaborative.”

Nate said it started to feel almost as if he was talking to himself, rather than engaging in the back-and-forth communication of a scientific debate.

“The best example of this,” he says, “is the discussion section. It’s called ‘discussion,’ but you proceed to have a conversation with yourself and create these straw-man arguments. It started feeling really fake to me.”

Access was another problem. If your university can’t afford to subscribe to a journal, you’ll be forced to write to the paper’s authors, or to scour SciHub or other less-than-legal sources.

“Of course I’m going to have to be a criminal to get my PhD done,” Nate adds wryly.

So what’s a postdoc to do? Nate decided to give new life to an old idea whose time had come.

Making a Micropublication

“If you think of the current literature as big, slow, and exclusive, micropublication is the opposite of that,” Nate says.

He summarizes a micropublication this way: “It is a single figure, a single finding. What differentiates it is that you’re not waiting until you have a full, complete, clear narrative. You’re really publishing individual findings.”

Imagine an average cell biology paper. You might have multiple figures showing Western blots, immunofluorescence, DNA purifications, or statistics. Presumably, those are all referenced in the narrative arc of your paper, supporting some new conclusion.

But along the way, you probably did a few experiments that “didn’t work.” Or maybe they contradicted your central finding, and you left them out in the interest of finally finishing up your manuscript.

Some of those experiments would probably benefit from additional controls, or better antibodies held in another lab. You won’t learn about those improvements until the reviewers send the paper back,