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Nature Physics on the fruits of online collaboration

The April Editorial in Nature Physics (5, 237; 2009) looks at the effects of ten years of the web: its fundamental impact on activities such as browsing library content, buying textbooks, or arranging conference travel. Although he way in which most physicists actually do research day to day seems less affected, this is bound to change, predicts Michael Nielsen in his Commentary on page 238 of the same issue of Nature Physics, as information becomes less static and more active.

An example of online collaboration is the Polymath1 project, an experiment in ‘massively collaborative mathematics’ initiated by Fields medallist Tim Gowers, of the University of Cambridge, UK. From the Nature Physics Editorial: “In late January and early February this year, Gowers wrote several posts ”https://gowers.wordpress.com/">on his blog in which he explained a specific mathematical problem, its background and the procedures by which he hoped it could be solved “by means of a large collaboration in which no single person has to work all that hard”. In the weeks that followed, a lively discussion developed in the comment section of the blog, with more than a dozen people making substantial scientific contributions. Nielsen set up a wiki to collate the insights gained and related material. On 10 March, Gowers announced: “Problem solved (probably)”. "

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