Science in the web age: Joint efforts
Great article on blogs on Nature
"Jason Kelly, an MIT graduate student involved in OpenWetWare. The upcoming generation, he says, believes that excessive competition can harm science; they see the benefits of brainstorming their research ideas on blogs as far outweighing the risks.
Kelly admits some may regard this view as naive. But Schmidt[Gavin Schmidt, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York,] suggests that once scientists come up with some sort of peer-review mechanism for blogs that increase their credibility, without diminishing their spontaneity, blogs will take off."
Yes, blog in scientific publishing will take off and may result in BlogFactor too.
Posts
1 comment:
I think we need to get back to the fundamental purpose of scientific publication: to communicate actionable information from one researcher to another. Most scientific information is so specific that there may be only one other researcher in the world looking for it. Blogs and other RSS technologies are creating extremely efficient vehicles for that communication. This has nothing to do with peer review. Either the information is useful and actionable or it is not. The researcher looking for the information has the skills to make that determination. Moving science forward and persuading a tenure committee are two completely different problems. Here is an example of a blog used to communicate science in that way.
Post a Comment