The current issue of The Scientist magazine has an article on science weblogs. Nodalpoint gets special attention as one of the first science blogs on the web. The author, David Secko, gives a fair assessment of the current state of weblogs for science. He emphasizes that weblogs have great potential for providing a new medium for sharing ideas amongst scientists:
Even more exciting is this: How about a blog after every scientific paper published? Here scientists could debate results in real-time right on a journal's homepage.
I won't elaborate on that, but simply point you to Spitshine's post on The internet is changing everything but scientific communication. Maybe weblogs are the answer ?
I was interviewed for the article, which was a new experience for me. I tried to make it clear that nodalpoint is a community driven site. It is because of the interesting contributions that nodalpoint is one of the best science weblogs around. Although this is not mentioned in the article I'd like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed to the site over the years: Daniel Gupta (currently in charge of Australia's national transport security), Neil Saunders (Archaea Web), Chris Cotsapas, Pedro Beltrao, Matt Hope (a.k.a. Dopey of Sysadmin fame), Jawahar Swaminathan (a.k.a Jaws, developer of BioBar), Marco Valtas, Alf Eaton (of HubMed fame), Toniher and of course many others.
Comments
There is some kind of a
There is some kind of a comment option in the PLoS Bioinformatics web site. However, I couldn't find any posted comment, and the editors say they review these comments, so it not realy in real-time. I realy could use a place to as "is this paper realy worht anything?", or more specificaly "is this statistic good for this data?" "is the data source up to date?"
I'm afaid the journal's intrest does not promote such questions. Maybe a "shadow" journal site would be nice. just a thought..
Biology News Net
I was interviewed too for The Power of the Blog (for Biology News Net, while on vacation, even! :)). A great experience, and the article raise one important issue : the lack of communication (and collaboration) within the biology field. From experience, scientists in the field don't share ideas willingly; competition and the need to 'publish or perish' doesn't help.
I set up a forum system on my website where people can comment on the daily news, and attracting people interested in this kind of activity isn't easy. Attracting knowledgeable people is even harder. It's a critical mass thing, I guess.
Building a centralized system where people can comment on recently published papers would be terrific; if people care / dare express themselves. It wouldn't even be terribly hard to implement; attracting enough people to make the system work would, in my view. It's worth trying, tough!
Congratulations Greg
Congratulations Greg, you are doing a great job.
Debating scientific papers in blogs is a good idea.
cheers
Publiactions and blogs
Debating ones paper in a blog sounds like a good idea.
The journals homepage might not be the best place considering the registration hassles, the trolls and what not. However, I should give it a try once my next papers appear in print. Watch this space...