Bora explains it all

On the topic of science blogging, I recently came across a gorgeous Flash presentation of the history of the universe, from the Big Bang to humanity. Check it out at Evolution - What Next?, and click on the red arrow to start it, then click and drag the slider along the timeline.

There seem to be lots more neat Flash animations about scientific topics on the site too.

Ebonmuse-

He beat you to it.

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/04/another_timeline.php

PZ -

Read your comment on Coturnix's blog about getting 'scooped' (what a daft expression to use for what is a deeply offensive practice!) after publishing on your blog before. I totally understand where you're coming from on that - but I wonder whether it might be worth revisiting this? Since you are now part of ScienceBlogs you might be in a more secure position, since we already know that SEED is quite jealous of you lot and would likely support you legally. It would be extremely interesting to have more insights into what you are doing research-wise!

Of course, the flip side of this is that it might be less possible than formerly for you to publish anything here, since I don't know how far it would lead to reasearch ownership disputes between SEED and UMM (which obviously you would not be in a position to enter into)...

Ultimately, though, if science blogging is to have any truly significant future someone is going to have to stake out the blogosphere as a copyrighted publication zone ranking equally (in that respect) with any other publishing outlet. It would be good to see someone here at ScienceBlogs - with the weight of the SEED legal team behind them - could take up the gauntlet...

[Explnitory note: of course, science blogging has a significant role as a communication medium anyway; what I mean when I say 'truly significant' above is that by default the blogosphere is only a secondary source of information - if it could become a primary source it could be tremendously important, allowing the sharing of otherwise inaccessible data and potentially really radically enhancing the scientific dialogue.]

Read your comment on Coturnix's blog about getting 'scooped' (what a daft expression to use for what is a deeply offensive practice!) after publishing on your blog before. I totally understand where you're coming from on that - but I wonder whether it might be worth revisiting this?

I'm not sure you think we could rely on Seed's legal team to help here. Being "scooped" in science has little to do with copyright; there is no legal recourse. Rather, it's very similar to being scooped in journalism. It has to do with some other lab group who is working in the same area as yours publishing the same results you're working on before you. It doesn't matter how they did it or where they might have heard of the information that let them do it. But when it happens, instantly your data and findings are no longer novel and generally end up being published (if they are published at all) in a much lower visibility journal.

That's why it would be particularly foolish of young investigators in small labs to publish such information on their blog, particularly if there are larger labs interested in the same question. For example, I only have two people working in my lab (and I can barely afford that). If a lab with 10 or 20 people were to become interested in what I'm working onm, they could crank out results far faster and potentially scoop me.

Ultimately, though, if science blogging is to have any truly significant future someone is going to have to stake out the blogosphere as a copyrighted publication zone ranking equally (in that respect) with any other publishing outlet

That might be going against the current a bit, since several actual science journals are now experimenting with open access, more and more people use Wikipedia, and so on. Of course, someone still has to pick up the tab from all this, but science blogs should probably try to be a part of the emerging open access systems instead of trying to set up a completely new one.

Note that Wikipedia's policies expressly forbid "original research". Anything like a new scientific theory has to appear in another venue first before editors can include it in a Wikipedia article. (This policy was first articulated in the context of physics crackpots, of which the Web has many.) Citing blog entries is also frowned upon for anything except incidental matters, and that only if the blogger is a well-established expert. Anyone writing a Wikipedia article on a scientific topic is expected to back it up with textbooks and peer-reviewed journal material.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOR

Of course, any given article might fall short of these expectations, since it takes a while for the people who actually care to catch up with recent changes.

Yeah, but that's because Wikipedia is supposed to be something like an encyclopedia. It only makes sense to restrict blog entry citations when blogs aren't yet an established venue for research communication; an encyclopedia ought to be a little conservative about these things. The interesting question is whether the situation should change.

My own personal hope is that science blogs will complement, rather than supplant, the existing fora of scientific communication. Having tried many times to grok journal articles in fields like theoretical biophysics, supersymmetric quantum mechanics, plasma kinetic theory, etc., I've noticed that the constraints of journal publishing often force the authors of articles to sacrifice information. In your average physics paper, the jump between equations 22 and 23 can involve quite a bit of intellectual machinery. Intermediate steps aren't necessarily obvious, so people who try to reproduce the line of thought can waste considerable effort. When writing a textbook, one can be somewhat more relaxed and detail these steps, making an exposion which is more pedagogical.

Nowadays, lots of work in this field or that requires sophisticated computer voodoo -- Monte Carlo simulations, genetic algorithms and so forth. These can take astonishing amounts of time and effort to implement, but the nature of the implementation can get relegated to the footnotes or skimmed out entirely. If people wrote blog entries about how they set up their Monte Carlo programs, it could make the whole process much more transparent. Moreover, if you put such an entry up at the same time as your paper hits the preprint server, you don't run the risk of getting "scooped".

Just some thoughts from a guy who's seen the phrase "it can be shown that..." one too many times.

I sure hope that blogs, online journals, traditional journals, etc. get fused into a nice new modern whole. Blogs are great for multimedia - presenting video, audio or cool software applications that cannot be printed on paper as a supplement to a paper, for instance.

Blog-post as a scientific reference is most likely going to be predominantly in the area of reviews, and much less often with original research, except with negative/unpublishable data.

Scientific conferences are venues where much lore (and gossip) gets exchanged, people tell each other what they tried that did not work, they start new collaborations, etc. Online conferences (especially the beer parties!) can make this easier, quicker and more frequent - not to mention the obvious matter of cost and distance, especially important for integration of Third World scientists into the global scientific community.

There's also the issue that a scientist who maintains a readable blog, particularly one whose entries appeal to a variety of interests, can become a "mediagenic" figure. When a reporter needs a line on a discovery like Tiktaalik, where does she turn?

Ultimately, though, if science blogging is to have any truly significant future someone is going to have to stake out the blogosphere as a copyrighted publication zone ranking equally (in that respect) with any other publishing outlet.

I predict we would then see a sudden rise in the number of ID articles claimed to be in the scientific literature. Recognizing legitimate scientific work versus pseudo-science and quackery would be considerably more difficult.

I am sure glad I started this.

Jean-Claude Bradley, commenting on this over on Open Reading Frame, wrote:

When my colleagues learn that we try to publish everything we can onto blogs and wikis as soon as possible, the first question is usually about the fear of being scooped. I think that it is sort of like talking about work not yet published in a journal at a conference. If you are going to talk about it make sure that you make lots of noise so it will be hard to ignore. And I think in the blog world the analog of this is repeated discussion at many levels of research (raw experimental data, short-range analsis and discussion of those experiments in a larger context). Search engines tend to reward this kind of activity and make you hard to ignore. In our research, for example, a Google search today for "antimalaria compounds" pulls up our site as the first hit.
I look forward to the rest of your discussion on the subject.

Dr.Bradley's blogs are (among many others - check his Blogger profile) Useful Chemistry and Useful Chem Experiments 1.

Here is someone who is blogging research almost every day, all the mishaps and successes, in a prominent online venue. How can anyone scoop them?

I think that, as more and more scientists start blogging, fun stuff at first (bashing creationists, commenting on other people's papers, etc), more and more will venture to post hypotheses at first, then some negative/unpublishable data, and finally real-time reporting from the lab, almost like an online lab notebook.

As more people start citing blog-posts in their papers in real journals, others will start paying more attention. This is going to be a slow process because so many people are afraid and there is no formal structure yet. But formal structure will be built, by a community of scientists who are comfortable about being online.

As Dr.Bradley stated, the Big News are often first heard at conferences. Every conference I attended, there was someone giving a talk with some Earth-shaking new results. Often, it took many months for that research to show up in print, but nobody would dream of trying to scoop them, because everyone in the field knows who did it first - everyone heard it at the conference. The Internet just removes the neccessity of being there in person or hearing it from friends through the grapevine. The grapevine becomes public - the blogs.

Mark makes a good point. I guess the validation of good science would come from blog-posts getting cited by papers in peer-reviewed journals (online or offline).

Hmmm, a comment here and a comment on Aetilogy, both containing links, were held for approval and that was loooong time ago. Are they lost?

The point isn't whether something is copyrighted, at least in a commercial sense (the articles published in the Public Library of Science are technically "copyrighted" -- but in the name of the authors, not the journal), or even really whether something is peer reviewed (The physicists at arXhiv seem to have dispensed with that, although the idea may work better in the mathematical sciences where anyone can see if the proofs are correct than in experimental sciences like biology).

No, the real factor is whether funding agencies will accept "science blogging" as publishing. Really, nobody likes to write papers, format them to ridiculous inconsistent standards, and deal with peer reviewers who often make ignorant comments. But we do it because unless we do, we don't get grants.

The lanl archive allows pretty much anyone to publish, but it's usually pretty easy to tell by the abstract whether or not the paper is a shard of psychoceramics. It's a great source for papers in physics or astronomy -- a lot of scientists also put up expanded or more pedagological versions of their papers up.

If it were up to me, I'd arrange academic publishing this way. You'd have an open archive, like the lanl archive, accessible to everyone for both publishing and reading. Then you'd have academic referees to provide formal review. Reviewed articles would then be part of the "official" journal.

Jonathan Badger wrote:

The point isn't whether something is copyrighted, at least in a commercial sense (the articles published in the Public Library of Science are technically "copyrighted" -- but in the name of the authors, not the journal), or even really whether something is peer reviewed (The physicists at arXhiv seem to have dispensed with that, although the idea may work better in the mathematical sciences where anyone can see if the proofs are correct than in experimental sciences like biology).

Ugly incidents like the Bogdanoff Affair serve to remind us that even mathematical physicists can let the occasional piece of utter trash slip through, particularly when peer reviewers are more interested in catching spelling mistakes or factors of 2 in equations than really testing ideas. On one hand, this goes to show that even a peer review shouldn't be the last word: we should pay attention to how many times a paper gets cited, and journal editors should be willing to say "mea culpa, we phucked up," if the occasion demands it.

I think science blogging could help here, because if done right it provides a public record of community opinion. A mathematical physics blog might tell you something like, "While the paper of Jones et al. is valid, its conclusions are trivial consequences of the theorem given in Smith (2006)." These judgments are important.

I like the idea of a publishing scale, from blogs to open or mostly-open archives (arXiv), then to formal periodicals and textbooks. Each avenue of publishing serves a different need.

Over the years I've spent as a larval-stage physicist, I've spoken with a great many people about the publishing process and in particular where the physics crackpots fit in. Quite often, when a postdoc or a young assistant professor receives their first crank paper ("Neutrinos are purple and Relativity is a horrible mistake"), they stick it on their office door. It's like a sign declaring "I have arrived." To a lesser extent, the first e-mail you get from a Bogdanov supporter serves the same purpose: it shows you've reached Level One of the Establishment. (It's a lesser extent than a real crank letter for much the same reason that a blog post is less "official" than a journal article.)

It is also said that the arXiv's requirement that papers be submitted in LaTeX keeps out a sizeable fraction of the loonballs.

See also arXiv.org's endorsement policy.

Ugly incidents like the Bogdanoff Affair serve to remind us that even mathematical physicists can let the occasional piece of utter trash slip through

Oh how bizarre. I had heard of the scandal of Jan Hendrik Schön (not that we biologists can gloat about that after the similar actions of Hwang Woo-Suk), but this Bogdanoff affair is something else. But (from the linked page)

John D. Barrow, a professor of mathematical sciences at the University of Cambridge, says the brothers contacted him at that time with an odd request. "They were very anxious to obtain Ph.D.'s very quickly, and they tried to con me into becoming an examiner," he says. "There were two theses that they had submitted. They were laughable compendiums."

Overload -- crankiness of IDiot Barrow vs. crankiness of pomo brothers Bogdanoff ... head exploding.