Is posting raw results online, for all to see, a great tool or a great risk?
By M. Mitchell Waldrop
The first generation of World Wide Web capabilities rapidly transformed retailing and information search. More recent attributes such as blogging, tagging and social networking, dubbed Web 2.0, have just as quickly expanded people’s ability not just to consume online information but to publish it, edit it and collaborate about it—forcing such old-line institutions as journalism, marketing and even politicking to adopt whole new ways of thinking and operating.
Science could be next. A small but growing number of researchers
(and not just the younger ones) have begun to carry out their work via
the wide-open tools of Web 2.0. And although their efforts are still
too scattered to be called a movement—yet—their experiences to date
suggest that this kind of Web-based “Science 2.0” is not only more
collegial than traditional science but considerably more productive.
“Science happens not just because of people doing experiments but
because they’re discussing those experiments,” explains Christopher
Surridge, managing editor of the Web-based journal Public Library of
Science On-Line Edition (www.plosone.org).
Critiquing, suggesting, sharing ideas and data—this communication is
the heart of science, the most powerful tool ever invented for
correcting errors, building on colleagues’ work and fashioning new
knowledge. Although the classic peer-reviewed paper is important, says
Surridge, who publishes a lot of them, “they’re effectively just
snapshots of what the authors have done and thought at this moment in
time. They are not collaborative beyond that, except for rudimentary
mechanisms such as citations and letters to the editor.”
...
More: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=science-2-point-0&print=true
