The latest issue of the journal Cell (May 4, paid access) has an article by Laura Bonetta entitled Scientists enter the Blogosphere. In her article she describes some of the most popular science blogs and the people behind them.
The article is interesting for several reasons. Its main purpose is certainly to introduce the typical reader of the journal Cell (one of the most prestigious journals in the Life Sciences) to the concept of a weblog. Scientists traditionally have been well connected to the internet (remember the days of gopher and usenet?) and have used it for at least 20 years to exchange their ideas with colleagues in different parts of the world. But blogging has been slow to catch on – in sharp contrast to the huge popularity it has quickly gained elsewhere. A few reasons for this obscurity among scientists are obvious, e.g. lack of time, age (most bloggers tend to be younger) and reluctance to talk about unpublished results in public. But blogs are still a fairly new medium and I expect science blogs to become much more widespread over time.
The fact that this article was published in a reputable scientific journal is quite interesting as well. Journals have traditionally been one of the most important sources of information in science (besides scientific meetings and personal communications) and all scientific journals have managed the transition to electronic publishing and online distribution during the past 10-15 years. But the format and business model remained essentially the same. The almost universal access to the internet allows for very different ways of scientific exchange and the traditional journal paper (or talk at a scientific meeting) might not always be the best way of communicating a new scientific finding.
Open Access Publishing is one important driving force behind newer journals that take advantage of the new technical possibilities offered by the internet. PLoS ONE takes the idea of Open Access one step further and adds new features: annotations and discussions. These features were obviously stolen from the blogosphere where online comments are an important part of almost all weblogs. But what is stopping scientist of going the whole way and publish their research findings in their weblog? The answer is peer review: without the critical appraisal of your colleagues (or competitors), your scientific work will not be accepted in the community. Since production and distribution of scientific articles have (almost) become commodities in the age of the internet, peer review became the most important asset of science journals – and nobody knows this better than the editors of Cell. Peer review guaranties that scientific articles are interesting. Interestingness translates into revenue for the journal and scientific reputation (and consequently grant money) for the author. Interestingness of a journal is measured by it’s impact factor, which roughly measures how often it’s articles are cited by other journal articles.
The blogosphere works differently. The interestingness of a blog entry is measured by the number of readers, comments and other blog entries that link to it. Because the cost of setting up a weblog is so low, there is no need for peer review. The blogosphere has shown again and again that for news, politics, culture, information technology and other topics their blog entries can compete with peer-reviewed articles in traditional media. Only time will tell whether this also holds true for science.
