Science 2.0: An idea whose time has come….

In the Age of the Internet not all information travels at the speed of light. Two months ago Scientific American initiated an experiment in collaborative publishing on its site, SciAm, and only now am I 'catching up' with this innovation. Author Mitchell Waldrop posted an article-in-development on the site, entitled 'Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk? Wikis, blogs and other collaborative web technologies could usher in a new era of science. Or not'. As Waldrop suggests in the preface to the piece, many questions are related to what he calls 'Science 2.0' a variant of the more popular 'Web 2.0' buzzword:

• Will Web 2.0 tools really make science much more productive? Will wikis, blogs and the like be transformative, or will they be just a minor convenience?
  
• Science 2.0 is one aspect of a broader Open Science movement, which also includes Open-Access scientific publishing and Open Data practices. How do you think this bigger movement will evolve?
  
• Looking at your own scientific field, how real is the suspicion and mistrust mentioned in the article? How much do you and your colleagues worry about getting "scooped"? Do you have first-hand knowledge of a case in which that has actually happened?
  
• When young scientists speak out on an open blog or wiki, do they risk hurting their careers?
  
• Is "open notebook" science always a good idea? Are there certain aspects of a project that researchers should keep quite, at least until the paper is published?
  

The innovation, in terms of publishing, was inviting readers to post comments on the SciAm site, which would be considered when the author revises the article for publication some months down the road. As of today, some 121 comments have been posted (some by the article author as reactions). There is no way to assess this number properly, but based on my personal experience and on my observations of the reactions to other scholarly pieces allowing online responses, this is a very, very large input of commentary. I just finished reading all the comments and many reflect the kind of developments I would expect to be of interest to the author for incorporation in a subsequent version of the article. I think, in fact, Waldrop has struck a sensitive chord among certain subgroups of scientists who have been concerned for some time as to how various Web 2.0 functionalities could be incorporated into the scientific process. In some circles, these concerns are identified with the broader concerns of e-science, cyberinfrastructure, e-social science, and the more general label e-research (interestingly, only one of the postings made reference to e-science).

The article and postings provide a rich overview of developments and I have excerpted items from this material that seems to me particularly relevant to transformation of scholarly practice; see below:

• PLoS ONE: Public Library of Science On-Line Edition, a web-based journal; from the PLos ONE site: "An interactive open-access journal for the communication of all peer-reviewed scientific and medical research."
  
• OpenWetWare: collaborator at MIT involving biologists and engineers; from the site: "OpenWetWare is an effort to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups who are working in biology & biological engineering."
  
• UsefulChem: wiki for chemists; known as open notebook science; from site: "This is an open source science project in chemistry led by the Bradley Laboratory at Drexel University. Since all laboratory experimental results are made public, we refer to this work as Open Notebook Science as well.
  
• Nature Network: portal for open science exploration;
  
• Connotea: site for online management of research references;
  
• Nature experiment with open peer review: final report published in December 2006.
  

 

Excerpts from postings:

• Post 13: Open peer review: "...experiment in open peer review, with pre-publication manuscripts made available for public comment"….This phrase certainly is ambiguous. I read it as meaning the Open Peer review trial that Nature the journal ran over the summer of 2006 and which wasn't much of a success. I agree that Nature Preceedings isn't a trial but a fully fledged pre-print server for biological sciences. I guess it could be regarded as an experiment as all of the attempts at "Science 2.0" are experiments as they are far too young to know what will ultimately happen to them. Nature Preceedings may be more of an experiment as it is far from clear whether the biological sciences wants a pre-print server. ArXive was launched into a culture of wide sharing papers before publication to formal journals, thus facilitating existing behaviour. I think that a good test of success for Nature Preceedings when items presented there are reported on and cited in the same way that papers in ArXive are.
  

  
   

• Post 20: culture of science: "Everyone needs to understand that the people in charge of science, are people who never grew up playing nintendo or atari. While researching at Harvard, I encountered profs who recently learned how to email (2-3 yrs ago) and still write all their documents by hand, but perhaps worst question I've ever been asked is "how do viruses infect computers?" Thinking that viruses affect computers by coughing on them….Technology is not the problem for the adoption of "science 2.0." The problem is with the culture of science."
  

  
   

• Post 28: Science Blogging: "Just one correction: the Science Blogging Conference was in January, not April of 2007. And the 2nd conference is next week, January 18-19th, 2008."
  

  
   

• Post 32: Financing online journals: "The other obvious question not being asked here is how is this all going to be paid for? The last audit I saw of PLOS' finances was in Nature, and it showed them losing millions of dollars per year, with losses increasing in the future. While PLOS has claimed they're on pace to start breaking even at some point, I haven't seen any hard numbers to back this up. They stay in business because of huge grants that cover up their losses. What happens to any small society publisher that can't bring in huge grants? Has anyone been able to make a profit, or at least break even running an open access journal?"
  

  
   

• Post 40: Search engines: "This article gives a good overview of the state of Science 2.0. One aspect I do not find in the article is the increasing role of Google, Microsoft, Adobe and other Web 2.0 companies in science. Google Scholar, Windows Live Academic Search, Google Docs, Buzzword are just some of the tools that change the way scientific documents are created and shared."
  

  
   

• Post 45: blogs vs journals: "My instinct is that blogs and wikis are digital equivalents of the hallway conversation at a conference or the lab meeting, but are a long way from replacing journals. You don't get points for making the statement first about science unless you can prove that statement (otherwise we'd all set up random statement generators about signal transduction and wait for the nobels to flow)….Wikis and blogs are great for teaching technique and method. They are not yet the place to make the statements on which one's career rests, unless of course one's career is as a blogger."
  

  
   

• Post 46: copyright: "Any article about web 2.0 and science should deal with intellectual property. The publisher use of copyright is a real problem here - see Shelly Batts getting a takedown notice for blogging a figure from a Wiley journal over the summer of 2007. And the publishers are attacking the NIH public access policy on copyright terms now as well."
  

  
   

• Post 48: Core of science: "I would say however that the traditional process of asking a question, designing an experiment, interpreting the results, and distilling this into a (more or less) compact research report will never find itself obsolete. However, the data that informs the conclusions must be freely available."
  

  
   

• Post 55: dynamic science: "Science 2.0, particularly the use of wikis, transforms the reporting of scientific discover from a static (snapshot) process to a dynamic one. When dealing with scientific discovery a wiki is superior at capturing the process of investigation than traditional methods of information dissemination. In short, wikis provide an inclusive, ever expanding source of scientific knowledge which will have a dramatic effect on the publication of scientific findings."
  

  
   

• Post 56: accolades via open access: "1) In your discussion of pre-print and other open repositories facilitating peer review, it might be worth mentioning the story of mathematician Grigori Perelman. He solved a famous problem, and only posted the proof to arXiv, an open repository for physics and mathematics. Other mathematicians were able to check his work, and he ended up winning a Fields medal. The story is here:
  http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Sept06/library_arXiv.html"
  

  
   

• Post 73: buzz words: "As a web professional I would like to correct your usage of the term "web 2.0". This is a stupid buzz term invented by media hacks that didn't bother to do their research. The web has undergone a large number of major changes in use and functionality and version 2 was way back when text pages were allowed to use *gasp* pictures. If you want to eliminate purely technical issues then "web 2.0" was when web pages began to be used for entertainment, which was followed by the use for business. The web has been evolving for years and is well beyond version 2. Science has been evolving for millennia and I have no clue what version we would be on. Please stop using moronic buzz words in a publication that is supposed to be accurate and, well, scientific in nature….Aside from that I think that security at both the national and corporate levels will greatly hamper this "open" science. The naive idea that a date/time stamp would actually hold up in a court of law is pretty funny. It is so easy to alter the date/time stamp on files or database fields that that is one of the first things a hacker learns. Unless the entire set of records/data is backed up to a "hard" media like paper, it is vulnerable to destruction or alteration. These tools will likely be adopted in a closed environment but wide open sharing isn't viable with politics and technology as they currently exist."
  
• Post 86: archiving web 2.0: "Openess and collaboration in the age of Web 2.0 has many implications, but among the most important issues I see are 1) digital preservation and "citability" of Internet material, and 2) proper attribution…. On archiving issues I have written in my blog (Eysenbach, Gunther. The paradox of the current state of scholarly communication in the age of Web 2.0 Posted at http://gunther-eysenbach.blogspot.com/ Jan 18, 2008. Archived at http://www.webcitation.org/5Ux2jEb70) about the paradox that 1) blogs (and other Internet venues such as wikis) are - at least in theory - important venues for scholarship to publish hypotheses, opinions, analyses etc. outside of the traditional journal publishing system 2) yet, they are not considered "citable" or "publications" - which in turn affects their use, usefulness, and acceptance among researchers as tools for scholalry communication. Luckily, a solution to this exists, called WebCite (http://www.webcitation.org), a system which is live since 2005. It is part of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (consisting of libraries and Internet archives), and is used by publishers like BiomedCentral and over 200 journals to routinely archive and digitally preserve cited non-journal Internet material. Simply put, WebCite aims to make Internet material (any sort of digital objects such as blog posts, wikis, etc., except traditional journal articles, for which various archiving mechanisms already exist) more "citable", long-term accessible, and hence more acceptable for scholarly purposes. "
  
• Post 98: science & publishing: "Let me first note that you are not really talking about "Science" but about a subset of scientific publishing and communication.  That is of course very important, but there is a lot more to the overal practice of science, as enabled by computation and information technology.  A small, but growing subset of the academic community has been thinking about this and doing a lot of work for some years now, but really, the revolution (sigh...) is just starting.  Google "e-science" or visit the NSF OCI and CISE websites and look at the reports linked there….Web 2.0 (and the future cliches to follow) technologies can certainly be very useful in enhancing and transforming the way we preserve and communicate (and perhaps even create) knowledge."
  
• Post 101: software for collaboration: "I'd like to emphasize that Science 2.0 should (indeed, must) be about more than sharing --it should also address sharing software, and making it easy for people to write software that analyzes other people's data. I discussed this idea in an article in Science: http://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/~foster/science-2005.htm a couple of years ago….Here, by the way, is a talk that discusses Science 2.0: http://www-fp.mcs.anl.gov/~foster/Talks/060512%20Geoinformatics%20Foster.ppt."