Science publishing will become more interactive and more interesting due to Open Acess and Web 2.0, according to Bora Zivkovic, Online Community Manager at PLoS-ONE (Public Library of Science), writer of the blog “A Blog Around the Clock” and organizer of the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference. He discussed “Science Blogging: Science 2.0” at ConvergeSouth on October 19th.
Session Description:“Science blogs, wikis, Facebook, Open Access Publishing, Open Notebook Science - how the Web is changing the way science is done, organized, taught, published and communicated.”
He began with a review of science publishing, starting with the Gutenberg printing press, through the roles of scientific societies, and how journals began and the development of the format of the scientific paper. The human genome project made data freely available online, which opened up science communication and competitionand sped progress, facilitating sequencing of the genes of other organisms. Bora believes the human genome project is the beginning of changing science publishing, because genome sequences do not easily fit into the straitjacket of the style of scientific papers, and genome sequences can be peer reviewed after publication rather than before.
Open access publishing may be the next step. More and more journals are becoming open access. You can use materials published under Open access in any way you would like, as long as you cite the original. For example, you can copy and paste the entire article or parts of it elsewhere – including to your blog. Some papers include data files that you can download and analyze yourself, filtering it through your ideas and your software. The data can be reinterpreted and published again.
PLoS (Public Library of Science) publishes 8 open access journals. Two are highly selective (PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine). Four other journals are equivalent to society journals. PLoS ONE publishes peer reviewed information on all science, as long as it is well done and well written. Publication is quick – there is an average of 9 weeks from submission 19 days between acceptance and publication.
PLoS ONE allows readers to annotate, comment and rate articles. Each comment has a doi, which means you can cite the comment. At least one comment has included data. Bora speculated that if Watson and Crick had published their paper in a journal like PLoS ONE, there would be 5 decades of comments, including links to papers that were published later. There would be an entire history of molecular biology, available easily to everyone. Being able to easily access, comment on and interact with a scientific publication will change science education.
Bora’s job is to moderate the comments; he notices some cultural differences in how scientists versus bloggers express themselves, and is interested in how the style of scientific papers may be changed by the ability to comment later. Comments and ratings have the potential to change the rhetoric of science.
PLoS is also experimenting with making science videos accessible. On the SciVee website, videos associated with published papers are on the left, and other videos are on the right. These videos are fun to explore.
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