A young adult at the March for Science on April 22, 2017. Photo by L.D. May

The past few weeks have made one thing painfully clear: science is under attack and the integrity of science itself is on the line.

But here’s a hot take: we set ourselves up for this by limiting what science got in the public domain and forcing research into a one-size-fits-all mold that is incredibly burdensome to create.

Every day, we lose a government database of decades of research. Every day, someone with a mountain of unpublished data loses their job. And so we risk completely forgetting all of this incredible work, setting our fields back by decades.

Science can only be used if it is shared. The final step of the scientific method isn’t discovery – it’s publication. And for decades, we have made it incredibly difficult to share good science.

For nearly a century, modern science has relied on peer review and publication as the most important marker of credibility that determines if research gets recorded in the public domain and preserved for future generations to build upon. But our publishing system has almost exclusively required complex, lengthy articles that take months if not years to put together.

It’s no wonder that the overworked, underfunded scientist never tried to publish all those data. It was too much effort for too little reward. They assumed it would get published one day, but now we risk losing it all.

So in the time of Trump, we must rethink the academic paper.

To be clear: I don’t mean abandoning peer review as some scientists have proposed. Now more than ever, we need science to be properly vetted before being put in the public domain. Allowing anyone to put up a misleading preprint will just fuel misinformation and anti-science perspectives.

Instead, I mean we need a faster, more agile way to show that our findings are trustworthy and then share them. Not every publication needs a massive introduction and a fancy statistical analysis. Sometimes we have a dataset at risk of being deleted or forgotten that just needs to be shared along with clear methodology to ensure reproducibility.

This is why Stacks Journal is experimenting with a new format for a scientific article – the 2-Pager – a scientific article under 1200 words that is peer-reviewed.

Over the past few years, I talked to hundreds of researchers to imagine what the future of peer review and scientific publishing could look like. And time and time again, they said we needed a simple, ethical way to share findings that are important but not splashy or novel enough to justify the extreme costs and time required to publish a full-length article.

So here is my call to action:

Abandon your wordiness. Stop using article length as any marker of scientific credibility. Take a few hours and write up a 2-pager. Tell your journals to try a 2-pager too.

Today, there are many new ways to peer review and publish. We can share all sound science – including case studies, pilot projects, negative results, and datasets. We don’t need to circumvent, water down, or abandon peer review to get this information out before it’s too late.

This moment calls for immediate actions to preserve the scientific knowledge and progress already made by researchers. And that requires urgent innovation in the single most important process we have to put our research into the public domain: peer review and publishing.