This week’s issue of the journal Nature has an interesting series of articles on science on the web age, especially the role of blogs, wikis, open data, and other such stuff, including the OpenWetWare initiative. The overview is (I think) free, as is (I think) an editorial on the growing important of open data in science, but most the other pieces, while for-pay, are very interesting too, if you can somehow get access.
Most scientists remain uneasy about blogs (with the notable exception of one of my favorites), so the following bit of musing from an article is nicely provocative:
”Science is too hung up on the notion of ‘the paper’ as the exclusive means of scientific communication,” says Leigh Dodds, a web expert at the publisher Ingenta. Publication and research assessments are more geared to measuring a researcher’s standing than communicating science, he claims.
Jennifer Hallinan, a biologist at the University of Queensland, Australia, who runs the blog Cancer Dynamics, agrees with him. The web is providing a hierarchy of sources, she says, including useful blogs and wikis. “Each level of the hierarchy has its own sources of error, its own strengths and weaknesses,” she explains, “but these are known and can be taken into account when using them.”
Blogs associated with traditional journals may help bridge the gap between the literature and blogs, says Glenn McGee, editor-in-chief of The American Journal of Bioethics. The leading journal in its field, it was the first to create a companion blog, Blog.Bioethics.Net.
Despite all this talk in the Nature piece about the role of blogs, wikis, and open data in science, none of the articles actually have inline links to any of the sources of blogs that they cite, preferring to append them to the end like a dead-tree bibliography. That is an interesting editorial statement in itself.
Related posts:
“a hierarchy of sources” — Ah, well that’s all right then.