science blogs for intra scientific

Science blogs for intra-scientific community communication.

There's been some interesting chatter in the blogosphere about science

blogging, or the addition of blog-like features to electronic

scientific archives. We're not talking about scientists blogging to

educate their students and/or the public (a topic ably discussed by

Geeky Mom). Instead, the focus is on the potential of blogging (and

allied communication tools) as a way for scientists to communicate

with other scientists.

Last month, Clifford Johnson at Cosmic Variance considered the use of

group blogs as a research tool. He pointed out some potentially

valuable outcomes - a flow of information between scientists that has

less to do with the professional status of the person writing and more

to do with the content of the contribution, a setting where it is

possible to bounce ideas off each other even if they are not fully

baked, communications that are not bound by geography, speed (of

course), and searchability. This last element is especially attractive

for those of us who value the exchange of ideas at the water cooler

(or at the hotel bar at the professional meeting) but have

less-than-perfect recall. (I am usually the only one at the bar

scribbling in my notebook.) The searchability of science blogs not

only means that the great ideas can be recovered, but you can even

figure out who came up with them (or contributed to them).

More recently, Sean Carroll, also blogging at Cosmic Variance, noted

that arxiv, the electronic preprint repository for physicists, has

joined the blogosphere by introducing trackbacks on abstracts in the

arxiv. Quoth Carroll,

As blog readers know, an individual blog post can inform other blog

posts that it is talking about them by leaving a "trackback" or

"pingback" -- basically, a way of saying "Hey, I'm talking about that

stuff you said." This helps people negotiate their way through the

tangles of the blogosphere along threads of common interest. Now your

blog post can send trackbacks to the abstracts of papers at the arxiv!

In other words, not only is the electronic preprint depository

allowing lightning-quick sharing of information between scientists,

but with trackbacks it is now letting scientists see who is reacting

to these findings out there in the ether.

I'm a big fan of scientific communication. But there are some

interesting dimensions of these developments in scientist-to-scientist

communication. For instance, here's what Carroll says about arxiv.org

versus the "traditional" scientific literature in physics:

Any time you write a paper, you send it to the arxiv, where its

existence is beamed to the world the next day, and it is stored there

in perpetuity. Along with the SPIRES service at SLAC, which keeps

track of which papers have cited which other papers, physicists have a

free, flexible, and easy-to-use web of literature that is instantly

accessible to anyone. Most people these days post to the arxiv before

they even send their paper to a journal, and some have stopped

submitting to journals altogether. (I wish they all would, it would

cut down on that annoying refereeing we all have to do.) And nobody

actually reads the journals -- they serve exclusively as ways to

verify that your work has passed peer review.

So, it's not like you have to worry that keeping up with the blogs and

electronic preprints is going to be a huge addition to your

keeping-up-with-the-literature time, because scientists have pretty

much given up on keeping up with the journals anyway. (I can't really

criticize that. When I was in grad school, there was just one Journal

of Physical Chemistry; now there are two and they come out weekly.

Even if no one is reading the journals, it seems like the number of

journals there are not to read keeps growing!)

But if the journals now function almost entirely as certifications of

quality control (which, we all know, is connected to important

real-life issues for the scientist like tenure, promotion, and

funding), this points to a potential downside to the rapid

communication blogospherical mode of scientific discourse: there may

not be a great signal to noise ratio. Seriously, I've seen some

preprints that are pretty crackpot. Mostly, they never make it past

pre- to plain old print. But, if the idea is that electronic archives

plus trackbacks plus blogs will make for scientific discourse where

everyone gets a fair shake, we may end up with a whole lot of crap to

wade through.

On the other hand, people in the blogosphere (especially scientists)

don't seem to be shy about calling out crap when they see it. Indeed,

if you're evaluating someone's crackpottery online, it seems, you're

more likely to give a reasoned argument indicating wherein the

crappiness lies than you might be, say, as an anonymous referee. After

all, if someone thinks your diagnosis is crappy, they'll call you out

for it. So, possibly the relative transparency of communication via

the blogosphere will cure some of the problems of anonymous

refereeing.

It's hard to know whether the pseudonymous (or semi-pseudonymous)

blogging would serve to democratize scientific exchanges (since you

don't always know who's senior and who's junior, who's at a

prestigious institution and who's laboring in obscurity), or whether

this would mostly enable people to give props to their own work (or to

shiv their enemies without being called to account). I suppose, if