The process of conducting scientific research is currently completely separate from the process of publishing that research. There is no reason why it should be that way. The possibility exists whereby public accessibility with appropriate reward can be considered an extension of the research workflow. The result is a product that can improve the comprehension of that research. In short this takes us ‘Beyond the PDF’. What is needed to go beyond the PDF will be discussed.
PHILIP E BOURNE PhD is a Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego, Associate Director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank and an Adjunct Professor at the Burnham Institute. He is a Past President of the International Society for Computational Biology. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA). He is the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal PLoS Computational Biology and a long standing member of the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and Genome Canada panels responsible for reviewing proposals relating to computational biology. Awards include the Jim Gray eScience Award (2010), the Benjamin Franklin Award (2009), the Flinders University Convocation Medal for Outstanding Achievement (2004) and the Sun Microsystems Convergence Award (2002). Bourne’s professional interests focus on relevant biological and educational outcomes derived from computation and scholarly communication. This implies algorithms, text mining, machine learning, metalanguages, biological databases, and visualisation applied to problems in drug discovery, evolution, cell signalling, apoptosis, systems biology and scientific dissemination. He has published over 200 papers and five books, one of which sold over 150,000 copies. He has co-founded four companies: ViSoft Inc., Protein Vision Inc., a company distributing independent films for free and, most recently, SciVee. Bourne is committed to furthering the free dissemination of science through new models of publishing and better integration and subsequent dissemination of data and results which as far as possible should be freely available to all. Personal interests are squash, hiking, skiing, flying and motor bikes.
