edit Science 2.0 at Scientific American

Widely reported, but anyway

Welcome to a Scientific American experiment in "networked journalism," in which readers—you—get to collaborate with the author to give a story its final form.

The article, below, is a particularly apt candidate for such an experiment: it's my feature story on "Science 2.0," which describes how researchers are beginning to harness wikis, blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies as a potentially transformative way of doing science. The draft article appears here, several months in advance of its print publication, and we are inviting you to comment on it. Your inputs will influence the article’s content, reporting, perhaps even its point of view.

So consider yourself invited. Please share your thoughts about the promise and peril of Science 2.0

You can add your thoughts at: Scientific American - Edit This - Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk? - January 9, 2008

It has some interesting discussion on the reputation issue

"The peer-reviewed paper is the cornerstone of jobs and promotion," says PLoS ONE's Surridge. "Scientists don't blog because they get no credit."

The credit-assignment problem is one of the biggest barriers to the widespread adoption of blogging or any other aspect of Science 2.0, agrees Timo Hannay, head of Web publishing at the Nature Publishing Group in London. (That group's parent company, Macmillan, also owns Scientific American.) Once again, however, the technology itself may help. "Nobody believes that a scientist's only contribution is from the papers he or she publishes," Hannay says. "People understand that a good scientist also gives talks at conferences, shares ideas, takes a leadership role in the community. It's just that publications were always the one thing you could measure. Now, however, as more of this informal communication goes on line, that will get easier to measure too."

The acceptance of any such measure would require a big change in the culture of academic science. But for Science 2.0 advocates, the real significance of Web technologies is their potential to move researchers away from an obsessive focus on priority and publication, toward the kind of openness and community that were supposed to be the hallmark of science in the first place. ...

Meanwhile, Hannay has been taking the Nature group into the Web 2.0 world aggressively. "Our real mission isn't to publish journals, but to facilitate scientific communication," he says. ...

Indeed, says Bora Zivkovic, a circadian rhythm expert who writes at Blog Around the Clock, and who is the Online Community Manager for PLoS ONE, the various experiments in Science 2.0 are now proliferating so rapidly that it is almost impossible to keep track of them. "It's a Darwinian process," he says. "About 99 percent of these ideas are going to die. But some will emerge and spread."

Here's what I left as a comment:

As I wrote in a recent blog posting, in the online world one has to think about both reputation and attention.  In the traditional print journal world, the only way to get attention was by first gaining reputation through publication.  In the online world, I would argue particularly for young scientists, the amount of attention they can get (from search hits, incoming links, and others reading their blog postings and wiki entries) can be invaluable in finding collaborators, and in building an "online reputation".  This means there is a challenging balancing act between waiting to gain reputation through traditional journal articles, versus taking a risk and being more open, and gaining both attention and reputation through the digital medium.  In my experience (as a non-scientist), the opportunities opened up by blogging have been much greater than I could ever have imagined, and the responses are more rapid and more numerous than I get when I publish in a journal.