Yet another entrant into the fray, ResearchGATE (found via Bora’s blog). As usual, I’m not sure what the point is, or how this particular site will differentiate itself from all the others. I’m particularly pessimistic, given their mission statement:
“Instead of disseminating scientific results in regularly scheduled and printed journal issues, now a continuous release of articles in online format will change and expedite the way new results are spread. Without anonymous review processes, open access journals or wiki-like concepts will assure the quality of science. Hidden conglomerates of various interests will give way to transparent and traceable new concepts of scientific impact measurements. Science is collaboration, so scientific social networks, wikis and other means of collaboration will facilitate and improve the way scientists collaborate.”
Which is well-intentioned, to be sure, but strikingly naive and unrealistic.
—article continues…—
I mean really, does anyone think Wikipedia is free from hidden conglomerates, or secret agendas by various interest groups?
As far as facilitating research, I’ll ask a question I’ve asked before. Top journals reject greater than 90% of what’s submitted to them. If you’re a hard-working scientist, how much of your time are you willing to devote to reviewing the bottom 5% of those rejections? Forget the really good papers, or the papers that would have a direct impact on your research, which you’ll need to read also. What about the rejected papers from lesser journals? How many days of your week are you willing to commit to digging through the dregs? Unless you’re willing to do this, then why should anyone else read or review your paper? Isn’t it likely in a social network set-up that you’ll see the top-rated papers coming from scientists who are the best-connected, rather than those doing the best research? Aren’t online social networks really based on the idea of leveraging status from one’s connections? Some would argue this already extends to the world of science blogging. Doesn’t this lead to more of a popularity contest, and less of a meritocracy?
The credibility of what you read online is nicely covered in this article, (found via The Digitalist). It’s a great description of how easy it is to spread misinformation online. Sure, eventually someone figured out that the story wasn’t true, but as the article points out, most readers will never know that. The original untrue articles are all archived online. How many people who read them when they came out, or stumble across them in the future will dig deeply enough to find out the story was a hoax? Is this really the best way of spreading research? As Jason Scott has famously pointed out:
Wikipedia really wastes energy, that’s it’s little secret. You say, wow, this is … you know, it’s an amazingly inefficient process. Not just like, we could really tune the spark plugs and it’ll run a little better. I mean literally just dropping ballast as it goes.
Wouldn’t it be better to set up a system where untrustworthy material can be weeded out in advance so you don’t have to waste your time? Maybe we could call the person who does this an “editor”.
Bench Marks 
May 26, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Hah, yes, I saw that one. My feeling was pretty much “meh”.
Bora asks the question “Which one will win?”. I’m asking “Is it working?“, begging (as you appear to be) “Is it worth it?”.
My own feeling is that we’ll have to embrace something, as students who have grown up with Web 2.0 and social networks begin to run things. I’m not sure, at the moment, that any of the possibilities are it. We don’t (yet) have a Google, or an iPod.
But yes. Why should we trust a social networking site to do the peer review?
ResearchGATE’s mission statement is just not working for me. What have they got against anonymous peer review? Do they really believe that all journals are not transparent vis-á-vis this process?
I don’t think Editors will go away just yet. Not for a long, long time.
May 27, 2008 at 3:26 am
Always look forward to your writings. They always lead to great discussions.
I’m sure I will write some more. It is late here and I need to get to work later this morning 😉 Here is one thing I wanted to add.
“How many people who read them when they came out, or stumble across them in the future will dig deeply enough to find out the story was a hoax?” That is a worry even with credible peer-reviewed articles.
Misinformation, either accidental or deliberate, can occur anywhere. While infrequent, there are many examples (i.e. Piltdown Man, Cold Fusion, South Korean Stem Cell Research and many, many smaller examples) that can take many years to correct.
Heck, this is always something I worry about when doing a literature search or writing a grant – that an article from several years ago will have been shown to be incorrect but I happen to miss the paper that corrects it. I think this is one reason why review articles are very useful. And good peer review.
But on the Web, these sorts of errors can be corrected much more rapidly. Most of the sites that pop up if you search for the article you mention now state that it is a hoax. I always check Snopes when I get one of those emails. As Mark Twain said “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” I think that is some ways the Web can shorten this to perhaps one-quarter;-)
[Except, that searching online, we now find that Mark twain actually never said any such things, at least in print. The quote is probably folk wisdom but has been traced to a sermon given in 1855 by C. H. Spurges, although even this may not be the correct attribution.]
Nothing beats a good editor and peer review for producing superlative papers. But the Web is also much faster at self-correction. So I fully expect there will be some very good uses for Science on the web.
Finally, I am not convinced that ResearchGATE is even close to being useful for a scientist.
May 27, 2008 at 5:39 am
[…] das Portal in der Blogwelt hierzulande nur bei SciBlog und bei einigen internat. Blogs (etwa hier, hier und hier) registriert. […]
May 27, 2008 at 8:16 am
Richard (Grant), thanks for the comment. I enjoyed your article, and where you asked, “Which is going to become the Facebook, and which the Myspace?”, it made me want to ask, “Does science need a Facebook or a Myspace?” Is this something useful for professionals? What other professions communicate in this manner–are there social networks for investment bankers? For bakers? For sporting goods store owners? Does this paradigm even apply?
May 27, 2008 at 8:20 am
Richard (Gayle)–too true, although it’s pretty standard for academic journals to include links to any errata or retractions on the actual paper itself. Of course, if you download the pdf when it first comes out, then you wouldn’t get this up to date version. Yes, agreed, the “many eyes” do indeed speed corrections, but the spread and acknowledgment of these corrections is a sticky issue, both for journals and probably moreso out in the wild.
May 27, 2008 at 10:05 am
Of course, the links work great now with the Internet. In the old days, changes would just be published in another edition, often complicating finding the correction unless you found it in Index Medicus. With my Xerox copy, I would never hear about the change. Now, the correction can be placed right with the article.
The best hope for corrections is that they are open and available. Science has realized for a long time that it only progresses is for it to be available to a much wider community. They are much more open now, because they are easier to tag to the original article.
Of course, it is not so much corrections as just the fact that science changes so fast and what was a workable hypothesis 2 years ago may have been shown to be incorrect or misinterpreted today. Not so much as misinformation as simply changing knowledge.
The fastest way to find out what current thought is comes not from searching the literature but from talking with an expert in the field. To really get on top quickly, email an author and ask questions. The second fastest comes from reading a good recent review written by an expert.
As with many things the key to misinformation or simply misleading information is to have a large, strong social network that can be called upon to help. While the Internet increases the flow of misinformation, it also enlarges the community making it easier for corrections to follow.
May 27, 2008 at 10:23 am
Loved Richard Grant’s column. I certainly do not expect Web 2.0 tools to replace journals, no more than email replaced the telephone. They will simply provide a different mode for dissemination of information.
As he mentioned, while researchers were slow to use email, now they use it for EVERYTHING, even for actions it is not best suited for. I expect Web 2.0 tools that can perform these actions more efficiently will become commonplace.
But a Facebook clone will not be what scientist’s require. Our goal is not to make friends. If I knew just what a killer science social application would be, I’d be out creating it. But things like SciVee and Jove may become much more important than forums.
Perhaps virtual symposia will become more common. These remove the need to occupy the same time and place for information transfer. While these will never replace in-person conferences (a virtual pub is just not possible), they can be much easier and cheaper to set up.
May 27, 2008 at 11:08 am
I don’t remember a lot of scientists being slow to accept e-mail, but then again, I was a grad student when it first arose, not an old stuck in the mud curmudgeon as I am now.
I’m not really sure on the video sites. I think they can serve useful purposes, but they can also be serious timesinks. I can read a paper a lot faster than the time it takes to watch a one hour talk. And while I’m a big fan of visual explanations and we encourage authors to submit videos with their protocols, I don’t see a lot of upside in video protocols. We talked about a collaboration with one of the science video sites for CSH Protocols, but where we wanted short, maybe 1 minute videos showing a particular manipulation, or the one hard to explain part of an assay, they wanted longform 30 minute videos going through every step in the protocol (“…now add NaCl to water and stir. Wait for it to dissolve…”). To learn a new technique, I might sit through a short video once, but I’m not going to watch it every time I do the assay.
May 27, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Thanks for your kind comments.
Part of the question is whether we, as scientists, really want/need a Facebook/MySpace. I think extended collaboration is a good thing, and the WWW makes it really easy (don’t underestimate the isolation of places like Sydney, especially with rocketing oil prices) to do this on the cheap.
However, you both make very good points, and I should riff off them (or ask you to sign up to NN and comment there).
I’ve just been made aware of yet another community site, http://the-scientist.com/community , which at first glance looks like just another forum to me. Richard (Gallagher) (this could get confusing, really quickly!) has asked if I’d like to submit an Opinion after the Nature conference in August. I’m going to have to do a lot of serious thinking about this whole shebang, I realize.
May 28, 2008 at 2:44 am
Now I feel like an old timer. When we first got email (on an old VAX running VMS), it took almost 2 years before you could be certain that if you sent an email to another researcher in the same building, it would get read that day! Often, you would send an email and then walk down the hall to ask them if they had gotten it.
Hard to believe but that was what the early 90’s were like for me.
Yeah, video science is not there yet. Not every protocol needs that approach and not every scientist is going to be a great visual presenter. I think we will find a lot of things that are ‘wrong’ before we find something that is right.
But, watching some of the TED videos does begin to demonstrate just how effective visual communication of scientific ideas can be.
Again, these are other paths for disseminating information, not a replacement for current methods. But I am pretty sure the best scientific tools will not be anything that look like Facebook. MySpace, Twitter or Friendfeed.
[Another great TED talk.]
June 20, 2008 at 1:17 pm
Very good point about who will take the time to review the bottom 5% of papers. In my opinion, it would be interesting to gather “implicit reviews” of papers – by measuring (anonymously, of course) the actual “usage” of papers instead of only measuring citation impact factors.
For example, if a great number of researchers spent a lot of time reading a newly published paper (or a set of papers on an emerging subject), as opposed to quickly scanning through a paper and then discarding it, this might be interpreted as a sign that this paper has something important to say – long before citations start to appear.
In case you think that’s a worthwile idea, may I point you to Mendeley.com? There’s a short demo video on our homepage, as well as on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ct4O0Ect18
January 3, 2009 at 2:48 am
Thanks for writing a sane defense of the journal system. Although all my software is open source, I strongly support the traditional publishing industry. I think the new idea of charging scientists for printing papers is a complete scam with all the wrong incentives. People who complain about not getting access to expensive journals should just support their nearest university library — my university (Bath) will give you access to thousands of journals for 80 pounds a year.
As you say, the system of review and editing is key to quality control, which is in turn key to science working as effectively an evolutionary process. Without good selection we can’t make directed progress. Neither can we make directed progress if we forget the last 20 years of articles while thrashing around looking at random preprints.
As for Web 2.0 tools, I think google scholar is really raising the bar. I was just on pubmed for the first time in a few months yesterday and I couldn’t believe it! The system of recommended related articles and popup previews was a dream! That’s the kind of tool that will help scientists find out what’s going on.