Prototyping as research

Stephen Downes comments aptly on an article by Etienne Joly entitled Various ideas about scientific publishing. Joly's abstract begins:

For the benefit of the scientific community, completely open access to all primary scientific papers is clearly the only way to go. But to ensure of the quality of the papers published, it is hard to conceive that scientific publishing could be carried out by others than money-earning professionals. The only viable solution is therefore for the publishing charges to be levied on the authors. ...

He then appears to be looking for a way to justify these costs, and settles on an elaborate peer review system with differential pay for referees, graded ratings and so on. Stephen's comment:

... the authors cling to a mode of publication where articles are screened and refereed. That's still too slow. Why would we wait for formal approval before publishing a paper online? Put it up first, and if it receives enough critical acclaim, then clean it up with an edit and place it into a 'journal of record'.

Exactly - I'd even elaborate. The ability to self-publish online makes possible a new paradigm of academic research I wrote about a while back: prototyping. Instead of submitting 'final' polished results for public scrutiny, researchers distribute incomplete work online and revise it based on open feedback from their peers or indeed, from anyone they can interest. This is much more useful to the researcher - in edujargon, it's formative assessment rather than summative assessment.

Protyping is widely used outside academia as a way of developing innovative products without getting mired in endless specs and evaluations (see, e.g. the book Serious Play by Michael Schrage). It's also the way I'm trying to learn how to design online interactive mathematics.