This weekly Nautilus column highlights some of the online discussion at Nature Network in the preceding week that is of relevance to scientists as authors.
The Nature Network week column is archived here.
Michael Nestor writes the first of two posts on what he calls ‘casual collectivism’, which looks at the trend for scientific information used by students and researchers to be more commonly obtained via online resources than via conferences. Although the online Wikipedia model is that errors can be corrected and updates made quickly, there is a period of time in which information contained in the encyclopaedia is wrong. “When is casual scientific collectivism a problem?”, writes Michael. “When it involves a convergence of mass distributed networks of people, being channeled and bottlenecked into faceless, anonymous, and editor-free depositories of information.” For more of this fascinating argument, please visit Michael’s blog. (There is a related Peer to Peer post here, about various online encyclopaedias and models of accuracy.)
John Wilbanks writes a considered post on the business models of open-access publishing. The post, together with the comment thread, provides some perspectives on the business models that can be applied to “open access” publishing, whether profit or non-profit. See also a related post about publishers’ business models at Nascent, by Timo Hannay, and What is fair play in the blogo/commetosphere?, a post by Corie Lok, Nature Network Editor.
Following on from a post about technology-enabled communication between scientists, Richard Grant turns to the question of networking theories and results. This topic is also discussed at great and stimulating length, with a short diversion or two, by Jennifer Rohn and commenters, from the perspective of nomenclature and why it is important in enabling the innovative processes described by Richard.
Nature Precedings reached a milestone yesterday (9 July): the 500th document has been uploaded to the site. Read all about it in this post from Hilary Spencer.
“A lot of people seem to think that editors make a decision based on just reading the abstract and/or the covering letter, so I’d like to take this opportunity to say: THIS IS NOT TRUE!” Nature Neuroscience editor Charvy Narain takes her turn to describe her day job, at the Ask the Nature Editor forum.