A Bubble Popper : Nature Genetics : Nature Research
A bubble popper (semantic assertions)
Here, inspired by the bubble-popping metaphor as much as by Popper himself, we propose a way in which research articles can become partially or wholly semantic publications. This means that a publication can state not only that the entire article is fit for the journal but also that the semantic assertions the article contains (such as “mutation X in gene Y causes disease Z”) have met specific criteria. If this process is implemented, assertions within a publication made by the author will be checked against their stated experimental results by peer referees. When the experiment is an apt test of an assertion, the referees can state that and the journal can apply its own tag to make an assertion-experiment triple with provenance. This construct holds the hypothesis and the falsifying or confirming experiment together, and it is applied by the publishing journal or database after peer scrutiny meets its criteria.