Duke Listens!: Visit my main blog at MusicMachinery.com

It is paper review time. I'm on the program committee for a few conferences so I've been reading and reviewing a number of papers. Similarly, I have a couple of submissions that are out for review. The paper review process is really quite interesting. I send the fruits of my hard labor off to some anonymous judges, that spend some unknown amount of time reviewing, commenting and evaluating it and ultimately recommending that my work be accepted or rejected. This peer review process is a critical part of the research process - reviewers can find flaws in thinking or in methodology. They can point out overlapping previous work, They can suggest areas for improvement or even ways to extend the research to new areas. The downside to the peer review process is that all of this critical input comes at the end of the process, when you are finally ready to publish. Its never a good day when a reviewer points out a serious flaw in your paper ("paper should site work by smith that performed identical experiments with better results in 1968").

One way to mitigate this problem is to get early feedback from colleagues and peers. These colleagues can act as earlier reviewers who will (hopefully) point out flaws in the research early on. Sometimes though, it is hard to find colleagues that are motivated and versed enough in the subject matter.

Recognizing that early reviews of research is good, I'm going to try an experiment. I'm going to try to blog my research on a particular topic with the hope that researchers that are interested in the same topic will be able to offer continuous feedback or even contribute directly to the research. My blog will become my research notebook for this topic. I've always had great feedback/comments for my research oriented blog posts - so I'm hopeful that I'll get a continuous review that will keep the research on the proper track. If a paper results from this line of research, constructive critics will be acknowledged, and significant contributors to the line of research will be considered to be co-authors.

To avoid an entanglements about intellectual property and ownership, I'll stick to an area of research that Sun is probably not going to want to patent. Obviously, you shouldn't contribute any ideas that you or your organization may want to protect.

In the next post, I'll outline the goal for the research project.

Inspiration for the research experiment comes from Elias Pampalk, Daniel Lemire and conversations with Steve Heller.