Sharing knowledge

… Alternative to the traditional publication system

In the academic world dissemination of knowledge through journal papers can be considered the “currency” for researchers.  Somehow you are measured by the number and (hopefully) quality of publications when you are a researcher. Your credibility is backed by your journal papers and they also can boost your chances to get a position, just like what “likes” and “followers” means for social media players. To keep going with the currency analogy, let’s think of higher and lower value notes as it occurs with notes from different countries. For example, Euro notes are higher valued than Pesos the same way a highly-cited paper is compared to one with little or no citations. In fact, this analogy results quite accurate when one is aware of the complexity existing in both the academic and economic world. There are many reasons that prevent a paper to be energetically cited or to have a high impact and certainly, many of them are far away from being technical reasons. Nowadays, in the field of electrical engineering, hot and fresh topics are all related to green and clean energy and papers around this topics ended up highly cited. Fields like the high voltage engineering are mature fields where every new advance (that finally gets published) demands a lot of time and effort. Yet, it makes a lot of sense that a big amount of the research muscle be redirected towards these subjects because they are imperative needs of the modern world.

It might be inefficient, maybe unfair, to measure the quality or impact of research results by the fact that they are published in a journal and once it is, by parameters such as the number of citations. However, the traditional publication system is still necessary unless a better system becomes available. These opinions do not mean to discredit irrationally the traditional publication system, although they do want to comment on some important disadvantages of it, which at the end were a motivation for the current website.

The most trusted feature of high-quality journals is that your paper goes through a peer-review process. The review process is double-side blinded to avoid conflict of interests and the reviewers are chosen based on their experience, contribution and pristine reputation, which often is linked to their publications. However, this system is not free of “drawbacks”, such as conflict of interests, poor quality of the review/reviewers, etc. As a result, just to mention an example case, you might find that your six-month work will not see the light of the scientific world because, indeed, there was a unadmitted conflict of interests. Of course, the system is also good at rejecting papers that because of technical reasons are not ready to be published in their current form. Some of my own papers have been rejected by lack of technical arguments that supported my results. Another limitation is the scope of the journal papers. Many journals demand from your submission to be unedited, novel, unpublished elsewhere and state-of-the-art. If it fails to do so, another type of dissemination system should be found like for example, conferences, seminars, non-indexed magazines, personal websites or even weblogs like this!. Again, this makes sense in order to save room in the journals for the latest advances and results. However, the generation of another kind of knowledge that doesn’t fit any of these classifiers while it is useful and meaningful will have to find all its way long to be counted as trusted production in the academic world.

PDflex is a good example of this. By itself, it cannot be published as a paper, although it is a very useful tool for research. Proofs are the journal papers that were already published in well-known journals and that extensively made use of the capabilities of PDflex to process a big amount of data from PD measurements.  On the other hand, the software also serves outstanding academic purposes. Fundamental concepts about PD signals can be studied with it. Its graphical interface allows easy understanding of PD frequency spectrum, the shape of the pulses, effects of the filtering and comprehension of the effect of computation methods on the key PD parameters and clusters. Concepts, such as these most likely will have to find a place in textbooks and related literature, rather than in a paper form.

After proving its utility for both academia and research, we strive for finding a common place where to contribute to both fields keeping up the scientific rigorousness and robustness of the analysis. Last but not least,  although a significant number of hours and effort have been dedicated to developing PDflex, We have decided to release it for free seeking two major objectives: make knowledge accessible for everyone and boost the advances on PD field by sharing and joining efforts with society.

This is meant to be an open space for technical discussion and dissemination of knowledge so you are very welcome to download and try PDflex and contribute with us!.