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.

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

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.]

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.

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.

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.

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.