Hello. I’m the Chief Editor of Nature Medicine and also get to write on our blog. As Charlotte and Apoorva do such a great job writing about science and about politics, I will write mostly about the journal itself and about the editorial world—the kind of things that scientists like to ask journal editors when we visit labs or go to meetings.

To kick things off, I thought I’d write about Web 2.0 and scientific publishing. There is a lot of interest about the impact that a second-generation Internet that emphasizes collaboration and sharing among users may have on scientific journals. We even wrote an editorial about this topic.

One idea is that the community will increasingly do without high-profile journals to decide what an important paper is and what it is not. If many scientists get together to discuss papers in social-networking sites, they may provide visibility to papers published in obscure journals and deprecate articles from more visible titles.

If this becomes the case, and if high-profile journals make enough editorial mistakes while selecting the papers we publish, then the value of those publications will indeed go down. If this happens, then it won’t matter whether you publish in Nature Medicine or in a very specialized journal—if your paper is good, the community will appreciate it.

But wait a minute. First, there are a lot of “if”s in the previous two paragraphs. A lot of events—some more likely than others—need to happen for this scenario to come true. Second, what about the people making decisions about your tenure, about offering you a postdoc position or your first academic job, or about giving you money for your research? Will they be ready to stop looking at the name and impact factor of the journals where you have published and let social-networking sites supply the filtering service that journals currently provide? It’s conceivable, but the fact remains that we don’t really know what the second-generation internet will do to scientific publishing.

What’s your take on this matter? Do you really imagine a time when publishing in Nature or Science will stop being as meaningful as it is now? Or perhaps this question is misplaced and the impact of Web 2.0 on journals will take a totally different form. What kind of Web 2.0–driven changes do you think we need to worry about?