Crossing the Lines: Blog Comments on Academic Publication?
One interesting question in scientific publishing right now is how to "cross the lines" between academic publication and informal web discussions like blogging.
For example, I came across a blog post from Jon Udell, discussing how difficult it can be to find web discussions about scientific articles.
Now given the speed of the web, a follow up post describes bookmarks you can set to search services like Scintilla, del.icio.us, and Bloglines.
Besides Nature's Scintilla, other scientific blog aggregators exist, like PostGenomic and Chemical Blogspace. I've also seen new services appear for commenting on publications like ResearchBlogging.org and Journalfire.
So here's my question to the MacResearch crowd -- clearly a technologically savvy, scientific audience. Do you blog? Do you write about academic articles? Is this the future for discussing academic articles -- each scientist writing on their own blog? Or should we have aggregated services, for example for commenting directly on a journal's website?
Comments
never liked that word ...
I used to maintain a neuroscience related web log that I was ashamed of enough to remain unadvertised. However I was discouraged ultimately by the lack of discussion that was stimulated on the issues raised (various papers, ethical issues, interesting talks, etc.).
I think more interesting than this issue, which is dicey for several reasons including anonymity and various professional responsibilities, is PLoS One, which I find to be an incredibly interesting move in science journalism. I am intrigued with the project and yet adhere to my reservations that these very public, very accessible comments might cause more problems than stimulate meaningful dialogue.
Aggregated services need to have a public API
It defeats the purpose if a commenting service does not have a public API that allows comments to be aggregrated. As Alf's Conversations webpage has shown, the power of a public API is that it allows all comments on a particular paper to be aggregated. Do the journal commenting services allow this? I don't know.