Curation vs. Review

Back to the theme of curation, a nice post from Science in the Open titled It’s not information overload, nor is it filter failure: It’s a discovery deficit.

The most relevant paragraph for me:

Filtering before publication worked and was probably the most efficient place to apply the curation effort when the major bottleneck was publication. Value was extracted from the curation process of peer review by using it reduce the costs of layout, editing, and printing through simple printing less. But it created new costs, and invisible opportunity costs where a key piece of information was not made available. Today the major bottleneck is discovery. Of the 500 papers a week I could read, which ones should I read, and which ones just contain a single nugget of information which is all I need? In the Research Information Network study of costs of scholarly communication the largest component of publication creation and use cycle was peer review, followed by the cost of finding the articles to read which represented some 30% of total costs. On the web, the place to put in the curation effort is in enhancing discoverability, in providing me the tools that will identify what I need to read in detail, what I just need to scrape for data, and what I need to bookmark for my methods folder.

And now, to go reread that article I was supposed to review this week...