I never thought I would see medison 2.0. Since there is way to many of those online already.

In the field of medicine and biomedical research we are equally fascinated by the prospect of Science 2.0 and we are going to host a conference this year (Sept 4-5th in Toronto) called Medicine 2.0 (http://www.medicine20congress.com), which will explore some of these aspects.

See http://gunther-eysenbach.blogspot.com/2008/03/medicine-20-congress-website-launched.html for considerations about the scope of Medicine 2.0, which will include Science 2.0...

I think it is about what kind of community is based on scientific Web 2.0 sites, if they are professional group in certain field, we don't need to worry about the quality of chosen information.

Probably, we do not need to worry in general. Next generation, I'm sure, will be more clever when ours, and we can't predict any ways of science development. We just need to prepare a base allowing new generation make the first step.

Sorry to self-link, but it's too long to excerpt: my "take on the matter" is here.

I agree that Web 2.0 is really What Web1.0 should have been. If blogs and wiki are connecting people to people, that was what Web 1.0 set out to do all along, serving as an interactive space. Check out this site www.palmoiltruthfoundation.com

A great portal, it sets out to debunk all the lies that have been spread about this great natural oil that's virtually trans fats free and yet packed with antioxidants.

This site offers a forum for people from all over the world to share information and ideas about the oil. Now would you say that this is an embodiment of Web 2.0 or Web 1.0. Irrelevant isn't it, if you consider what the portal set out to do?

Juan raises an intriguing topic and asks an interesting question: What kind of Web 2.0–driven changes do you think we need to worry about?

Unfortunately, simply asking the question from this perspective bodes poorly for Nature's long-term relevancy.

The real question Nature should be asking is, How can we use these new tools to make our publishing process better for the world?

As Andy Grove has said, "only the paranoid survive". There is much widespread frustration with the current peer-review publishing process. Nature can only continue to be a relevant journal by addresses these frustrations and evolving to meet them.

http://kevindewalt.com/blog/2007/01/19/10-problems-with-peer-review/

I think that we will always need a way to estimate the relevance of a manuscript. Journal editors and journal brands provide this at the moment but I think that web technologies can provide for more efficient, cheaper filtering means. As an example I calculated the number of citations per paper for manuscripts tagged as "evolution" in Connotea from 2003 or 2004. This group of papers highlighted by the Connotea community has more citations per paper than papers from Nature or Science from 2003 and 2004.
(full post here)

I think it is a little bit to rhetorical and useless to interpret the competition in terms of a “winner takes it all”, 1 or 0 situation.
http://pimm.wordpress.com/2007/01/15/nature-medicine-20-alarms-by-its-editor-in-chief/

not the same thing, but:

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/119/1/e53

FWIW, as a journalist I've noticed editors of certain publications evaluating stories by their performance in Web 2.0 spaces like Digg and Reddit. Though these are far more mainstream now than even six months ago, they remain a tool of the technorati; the most successful stories tend to appeal to younger, hipster tastes.

Could a similar disjunction happen in Web 2.0 peer review, with the inclinations of early scientist adopters having a disproprotionate influence on the valuation of research? Would this be a bad thing? What other unexpected wrinkles could pop up?

I have a hard time seeing new web technologies (forums, wikis, social networking etc) playing a significant role in the process of peer review and getting primary research published. Certainly not replacing it in any way. Scientists pride themselves on having good quality control and so far, peer reviewed journals is the main method of quality control.

I do however see web 2.0 technologies as a way of fostering discussion/debate _after_ those papers have been published...as a sort of second round of peer review--a more dynamic and informal kind.

That's the kind of thing we're trying to encourage on Nature Network Boston (link below), which I edit, and on Nature Network, going live this spring. (sorry, shameless self promotion!)

By far the boldest experiment in "Web 2.0" journal publishing so far is the recently launched PLoS ONE site, which I've written about a couple of times on my own blog. "Crowdsourcing" peer review and editorial choices like this could lead to a new era of science publishing, making the research enterprise a true meritocracy without boundaries. Or it could go the opposite way, amplifying the ugliest aspects of academic politics and forcing even honest scientists to try to game the system. In other words, it has the same potential for success and failure as "Web 2.0," which has led to some amazing online collaborations, but also vastly higher loads of spam, scams, and stupidity.

Hello, I'm a PhD student. My subject areas are Biology and Molecular Medicine but I'm also interested in Information and Comunication Technology. I'm a big supporter of Open Source Software and Copyleft licenses, that's why this discussion about Web 2.0 attracted myself like honey for the bears.
First of all I think (as many others) that the definition "2.0" is misguiding. In an interview, Tim Berners-Lee, father of the web, was asked: "You know, with Web 2.0, a common explanation out there is Web 1.0 was about connecting computers and making information available; and Web 2 is about connecting people and facilitating new kinds of collaboration. Is that how you see Web 2.0?" The answer he gave is clear: "Totally not. Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along." (full text: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cm-int082206.txt).
So web 2.0 is how Internet should have been before its conception and how we claim it's going to be in the next future. At this point one should ask (at least) 2 questions: 1. how internet has been till now? 2. how could it be otherwise? Hold on, I'm approaching the kernel.
Till now the web most of us know has been like silos, databases, portals, with a common denominator, to be closed, static systems. Mirroring the classical editorial pipeline, few editors/webmasters had the power/duty to discern what, when, where, who and why publish. In many cases this process worked very well, but the web itself was planned to be even better. The secret is simple: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" (Linus Torvalds).
On the other hand, in the recent past the situation risked to become quite different. Telecom industries (and other lobbies) pushed to abolish the neutrality of the web. A web without neutrality means that users will have 2 (or more) levels of information access, the ones who want/can pay more will have access to every kind of multimedial information, the others will receive pre-packed infos from the biggest editorial groups. No user partecipation and democracy here means poor quality.
Given these scenarios, of course I'm happy for the way the web is taking, whatever its name. And I think also that all this will matter more to the referring system than to the editorial staff. A web 2.0 network could "provide a forum for giving visibility to papers published in obscure journals and deprecate articles from high-profile titles" as You said in the editorial. Isn't this good for the future of Science? Yes it is. And it can happen because a scientist would trust more the judgement of a community of scientists, than the one of few referees: it's a question of eyeballing again. What can do the editors in this situation to win the competition and to hold as brand? For sure they should not contrast this trend, it will just prolong the "pain". Instead editors who love their journal should anticipate this trend, but how? A revolutioning change in the course of action is like a jump in the dark. They have to plan the change. For instance they could set up the necessary webtools to let the scientific community to continue the revision process after the papers are published. Nature is going to do so this year (Nature 444, 971-972). I think it's ok that after a paper is judged cutting-edge (by the editor) and gets grossly shaped (by referees), it is refined in its technical contents and its conclusions (by all the competent researchers). No more than what erratum/corrigendum does now, but in a much more efficient and open way. Editors could also decide to make operative the decisions/requests that the post-revision system acknowledges, like asking the authors to provide raw datas, to modify some conclusions, to add control/new experiments and statistics. Actually the work could be refined in next years, under the light of new discoveries, or could have a follow up if new technological advances are available. It's clear that the editor's role is still vital here.
As a result of the recent Nature open peer review trial, it has been reported that "[researchers] are too busy, and lack sufficient career incentive, to venture onto a venue such as Nature's website and post public, critical assessments of their peers' work" (Nature 444, 971-972). This can't be true. Critical assessment of the literature is the work of a researcher, in what else is he busy? Critical assessment of the literature is the basis on which to build a career, why this should not be incentive? Probably the trial was too short (only 4 months) to recruit a sufficient number of papers (5% of the papers sent for review, which are 40% of the total papers that Nature receives) and thus of public comments.
While all this is fermenting, editors should take into account the fundamental concepts that the editor of Wired magazine wrote in Peer review debate web focus (wisdom of the crowds: http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/debate/nature04992.html). The Nature Medicine editorial says: "Journals have far fewer print subscribers because most people prefer to gain access to papers online". That is, we, the "managers" ( http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v13/n1/full/nm0107-1.html ), decided that it's better the online version of the journal. But which changes this bring? Which is the main difference between a printed volume and a web page? The space. A web page can contain virtually all past, present and future articles of Nature Medicine. Actually a web page can contain also all the papers submitted to Nature Medicine 1.0 but rejected without review process. There is no need in a web environment of the pre-filtering function of peer-review, and I think that all the discussion that complain how to bring pre-filtering into web-based open peer review systems have default inconsistencies.
So why don't give the opportunity to the authors of those editorially rejected papers to publish in Nature Medicine 2.0? The webtools are already working, just let the scientific community to discuss if those experiments are all bullshit or not. Editors may also integrate in the printed journal a section highlighting the best papers that the scientific community democratically elected as original but that slipped through the process. I think that this way a journal can become the winner that takes all (the good papers that would be otherwise redirected to more specialistic journals), and it's editors'due to convert these (and others) ideas into policy rules.
In conclusion, I do think that current peer review system has several flaws that must be healed and we can try to do it with new web technologies. The process is already started, even if it is still in its infancy. I believe it is possible, I trust the crowd's wisdom as quality control process. The real problem is how to manage the transition in the better/safer way. Editors'expertise will still be fundamental pivot players in this scenarios. I regret to look at peer review as a filter mechanism to fit into the print space of a journal. And if we succeed in improving the certification system, Science would defenitely benefit, decreasing false positive/negative results and accelerating the discoveries rate. Waiting for the true revolution that the Semantic Web will bring to life sciences.
Sorry for the lenght of the comment but it was necessary.

links:
Nature web focus on open peer review: http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/debate/index.html
Web 2.0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web2.0
Web neutrality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality
Semantic Web: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_web
Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group: http://esw.w3.org/topic/SemanticWebForLifeSciences

I love Nature Medicine and I hope in the near future readers may comment on every paper online.