Sometimes Zetland is more awesome than the beautiful NC sun!
I was offered a position on the editorial board of the Future of Food Journal (meaning I work for free, refereeing their papers). I was interested because the journal (1) publishes young researchers, (2) is interdisciplinary, and (3) is open access, but I wanted more than nothing for my contribution, so I made this offer:
I will serve on the board with one requirement: authors of future published articles will summarize their articles for the general public in a blog post. This requirement will take about 2-4 hours, at most, but it must be obligatory (editorial board policy), as academics -- even young scholars -- often pursue de minimus effort when it comes to non-research activities.
Please let me know if the journal will implement this policy, which will be beneficial to scholars as well as the public. Old-school scholars may be skeptical of the value of blog communications, but they are still thinking of paradigms dating from the 19th century.
After throwing down THAT gauntlet, I got this:
Our editorial board welcomed your suggestion. We will implement this policy in our blog site. All future authors will be asked to summarize their research papers into blog posts.
Victory!
This isn't much different than the requirement by Elsevier journals that you write 3-4 readable bullet points about your article ... except that the readable bullet points are mostly gibberish too. The trick will be to require that the blog posts be written in English.
