Many researchers design websites that contain a list of their research articles, and possibly also with links to the full text of many of those articles. In this note I want to promote a different although related concept, namely the idea that a website itself ought to be considered as a publication provided that it is designed in the appropriate fashion. I propose to use the term publisite for a website that is organized and used in this way.
Although research articles are the primary communication format especially in "STM" areas (science, technology, medicine), there are several traditional ways for capturing the perspective of the whole, including brief reference to research context within each article, the use of survey and tutorial articles, and the use of "collection" volumes and special issues in journals. All of these provide means of characterizing a research context together with a set of individual articles.
The use of research-group websites provide one more method for the same purpose: they make it possible to describe research goals, research strategy, and its realization in a coherent way. It is a matter of choice, and of local research culture, whether one wishes to present one's strategy for forthcoming work, or only the strategy that was used for the work that has been completed and published. Some researchers will be careful not to give away any information about their forthcoming strategy, others do not see this as a problem. However, everyone will have an interest in presenting the structure in the work that has been done and reported.
If it is accepted, in this way, that the information provided by a research-group website is more than the sum of the information in the individual articles that are included in it, and furthermore that it is an important communication channel for research results, then one should ask the question how this communication channel can be further developed in order to work as well as possible in the interest of science and the scientific community.
Publication websites, or publisites also need such mechanisms in order to serve properly for communication and archive of research results. It is however not possible to transfer the review system and the citation conventions unchanged; they have to be adapted to the characteristic properties of publisites, namely, that they are potentially large aggregates of information where components are added and changed at the scale of months and years. The following are suggestions for how the general concepts of citation and of peer review can be transferred to the new medium of researcher websites.
Websites change, or more precisely, the technology makes it easy to change the contents of a website. Whether and how the owner actually changes the website contents is another matter, but the possibility is there. This complicates the issue of citation - the site that I cite today may have other contents tomorrow.
Here is my proposal. Consider a scenario where there a number of major research groups in a particular area, and each of them presents its results in a website. For the sake of the argument, consider the extreme situation and somewhat hypothetical situation where there are no journals; each of the groups publishes its results on its website and nowhere else.
Furthermore, each of the sites contains a "list of citations" in the sense of a list of links to those other sites, of a similar character, that they consider relevant for their own work. If site A includes site B in their citation list, then this constitutes a commitment to be aware of what is being published on site B. Specifically, before the owners of site A add one more article (one more report of a new research result) on their own site, it is understood that they should double-check on site B whether its owners have already posted the same result there. If so, they should also include a citation on the article level to this result-report on site B.
Under a social rule of this kind, a website that has a very short citation list will likely be considered as irrelevant by researchers elsewhere, since its owners obviously do not care to keep track of what happens elsewhere. On the other hand, it will not be attractive to include too many other sites in your own citation list, because of the work involved in following what they post there.
Similarly, a website where the owners post too many, mediocre articles and reports at a rapid pace will be less attractive for citation, whereas a website that only posts concise, convincing reports when they have something essential to say will be an attractive citation item.
There is one important requirement for this scheme to work, namely that all content-bearing items in a website of this kind must be persistent and reliably timestamped. Persistent means that once an item has been posted, it stays. This is important so that it shall be meaningful to cite it. Reliable timestamping means that each constituent is labelled with the information when it was put on-line, and it is technically impossible to antedate an item. This requires particular technical solutions, but it can be done.
My suggestion is to use a ranking system, similar to e.g. the system for ranking of universities and of graduate schools. Each ranking agency will prepare a rank-ordered list of important research-group websites in its area. Typically such a list should be revised annually.
There is no reason why there should only be one single ranking list for a particular area. There may be different actors that prepare ranking-lists in the same area, or for overlapping areas, which means that a particular research-group website can appear in several of the ranking-lists.
Although an evaluation agent may choose to merely produce a ranking list without any further comment, it would be much more interesting if they would also provide feedback to the sites being ranked, with information about what aspects of the site contributed or detracted from the ranking, and suggestions for how the site can be improved. This is then analogous to the feedback and quality-improvement aspect of traditional peer review.
A larger example of a publisite with the same characteristics is provided by the author's CAISOR website.