Inverse seminars preserve an experiment’s history alongside the paper
Inverse seminars preserve an experiment’s history alongside the paper
On July 31, a team at the University of Pittsburgh described the inverseminar format in Nature Physics. A junior researcher presents a published study to one of its authors, and the recorded conversation receives a DOI, a permanent identifier that allows it to be cited in scientific literature.
A scientific paper usually records the question, method, and result. Early hypotheses, failed experiments, and conversations that changed the research plan remain in laboratory chats and in the participants’ memories. The next group sees the final result but not the paths that have already been explored.
The authors of the Nature Physics commentary propose preserving this history in a dedicated session. A junior researcher studies the paper in advance and explains it to the senior author. The author arrives without a prepared lecture. Questions then clarify the reasons behind decisions, chance observations, and false starts that are absent from the published text.
The format has already been tested in seven sessions over 27 months, according to the University of Pittsburgh. In one session, Michael Crommie of Berkeley recalled his group’s work on deformed graphene. According to his account, the study began with a chance observation in another project, and a conversation with theorist Antonio Castro Neto helped clarify the explanation. Crommie also discussed two projects that each took about two years but never resulted in a paper.
These episodes give other researchers useful context: why the team chose a particular experiment, which signal they initially dismissed as an error, and which directions had already consumed time. The paper explains what worked. The inverse seminar preserves the account of how the team reached that result.
The Inverseminars series publishes these sessions as videos with DOIs. The session with Crommie runs for 92 minutes. The DOI makes the conversation part of the citable scientific record, rather than a memory passed through personal connections. The paper is accompanied by the author’s reconstructed account of how the result originated.