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I. Gebeshuber, B. Majlis:
"New ways of scientific publishing and accessing human knowledge inspired by transdisciplinary approaches";
Tribology, 4 (2010), 3; 144 - 151.

Inspired by interdisciplinary work touching biology and microtribology, the authors propose a new,
dynamic way of publishing research results, the establishment of a tree of knowledge and the
localisation of scientific articles on this tree. The current two-dimensional standard of scientific
publications is outdated. Over-information in almost any field is a problem. Therefore, it is
suggested that, to succeed and be read, modern publications should be dynamic and use all types
of multimedia. Such ways of presenting and managing research results would be accessible by
people with different kinds of backgrounds and levels of education, and allow for full use of the everincreasing
number of scientific and technical publications. This approach would dramatically
change and revolutionise the way we are doing science, and contribute to overcoming the three
gaps between the world of ideas, inventors, innovators and investors as introduced by
Gebeshuber, Gruber and Drack in 2009 for accelerated scientific and technological breakthroughs
to improve the human condition. Inspiration for the development of above methods was the fact that
generally tribologists and biologists do not see many overlaps of their professions. However, both
deal with materials, structures and processes. Tribology is omnipresent in biology and many
biological systems have impressive tribological properties. Tribologists can therefore get valuable
input and inspiration from living systems. The aim of biomimetics is knowledge transfer from biology
to technology and successful biomimetics in tribology needs collaboration between biologists and
tribologists. Literature search shows that the number of papers regarding biotribology is steadily
increasing. However, at the moment, most scientific papers of the other respective field are hard to
access and hard to understand, in terms of concepts and specific wording, hindering successful
collaboration and resulting in long times that are needed to speak and understand the other´s
language. For example, there is a plenitude of biology papers that deal with friction, adhesion, wear
and lubrication that were written solely for a biology readership and that have high potential to serve
as inspiration for tribology if they were available in a language or in an environment accessible for
tribologists. The three needs that can be identified regarding successful biomimetics for
microtribologists (i.e. joint language, joint way of publishing results, and joint seminars, workshops
and conferences) are developed further into a general concept concerning the future of scientific
publications and ordering as well as accessing the knowledge of our time.

Biotribology, Biomimetics, Publications, Organising knowledge