[Insight-users] Science 2.0 -- Is Open Access Science the Future?: Scientific American

[Luis Ibanez]

      "Science 2.0 -- Is Open Access Science the Future?"

        Is posting raw results online, for all to see,
        a great tool or a great risk?

        By M. Mitchell Waldrop


      http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=science-2-point-0

<quote>
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.”
</quote>


<quote>
Ironically, though, the Web provides better protection than the
traditional journal system, Bradley maintains. Every change on a wiki
gets a time stamp, “so if someone actually did try to scoop you, it
would be very easy to prove your priority—and to embarrass them. I think
that’s really what is going to drive open science: the fear factor. If
you wait for the journals, your work won’t appear for another six to
nine months. But with open science, your claim to priority is out there
right away.”

Bradley concedes that researchers may sometimes have legitimate reasons
to think twice about being so open. If work involves patients or other
human subjects, for example, privacy is a concern. If a scientist is
planning to publish in a journal that insists on copyrighting text and
visuals, prepublishing online could pose a problem. And if work might
lead to a patent, it is still not clear whether the patent office will
accept a wiki posting as proof of priority. Until that is sorted out, he
says, “the typical legal advice is: do not disclose your ideas before
you file.”
</quote>
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=science-2-point-0&page=3

<quote>
The Payoff of Collaboration
Acceptance of such measures would require a big change in academic
culture. But for Science 2.0 advocates, the real significance is the
technologies’ potential to move researchers away from an obsessive focus
on priority and publication toward the kind of openness and community
that were the supposed hallmarks of science in the first place. “I don’t
see the disappearance of the formal research paper anytime soon,”
Surridge says. “But I do see the growth of lots more collaborative
activity building up to publication.” And afterward as well: PLoS ONE
allows users not only to annotate and comment on the papers it publishes
online but to rate the papers’ quality on a scale of 1 to 5.
</quote>
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=science-2-point-0&page=4



<quote>
Meanwhile Hannay has been taking the Nature group into the Web 2.0 world
aggressively. “Our real mission isn’t to publish journals but to
facilitate scientific communication,” he says. Among the efforts are
Nature Network, a social network for scientists; Connotea, a social
bookmarking site for research references patterned on the popular site
del.icio.us; and Nature Precedings, a Web site where researchers can
comment on unpublished manuscripts, presentations and other documents.
</quote>
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=science-2-point-0&page=5



Full article at:

    http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=science-2-point-0



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   Luis