The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has informed us that Cold Spring Harbor Protocols has been selected to be indexed and included in MEDLINE, and that our articles will now be included and searchable using PubMed. We’re very pleased to share this announcement as it should make it easier for readers to find the high quality protocols our authors have contributed since the journal’s inception. I’m not sure how long the indexing process takes, but look for us to start turning up in your search results in the near future.

Inclusion in PubMed is another great reason to publish your methods papers with us. As a reminder to all, CSH Protocols is a peer-reviewed journal with no page charges, and we offer authors a royalty based on the usage of their articles. A high level of editorial support is available for authors and we’re happy to work with you to turn your innovative laboratory procedures into a useful community resource. Instructions for authors can be found here.

I’ve recently written two pieces on scientists and social networks over at my other blogging gig, and thought they might be of interest to readers here:

Scientists Still Not Joining Social Networks

and

NIH Funds a Social Network for Scientists–Is It Likely to Succeed?

Time to catch up on some interesting links:

The End Of Free
Last week’s posting at the Scholarly Kitchen, discussing the idea of using free content as a marketing tool, and how some uses are reaching the end of their usefulness. I have a new blog entry there that will be out on Monday discussing Microsoft’s Bing and Google’s Wave.

Teen Practices
Very interesting set of observations of how teenagers use technology. Twitter and e-mail are boring things that old people use. Once again proving the idea that different tools are appropriate at different stages of one’s life and social development. This study backs it up with more numbers.

Landmark study: DRM truly does make pirates out of us all
A few weeks back, I wrote about the Kindle’s DRM:

By providing a product that suffers the limitations of lock-in and prevents users from doing the things they’re used to doing with books, Amazon is encouraging potentially honest customers to become copyright infringers.

This study offers further evidence for such behavior, and argues against DRM.

If Research Papers Had A Comments Section
A cautionary tale, in cartoon form.

Another Blogger Leaves the Seed Blogs
Some dissension in the ranks over at ScienceBlogs. Like we’re seeing at the Nature Networks, these clubhouses are hitting some rough waters.

For Wired, a Revival Lacks Ads
Interesting article on Wired Magazine’s struggles. It notes that Chris Anderson of “Long Tail” fame seems to make around $35-50,000 per lecture he gives to businesses. Ironic in that the concepts he champions seem to be failing at the actual business he runs.

And it wouldn’t be right to end one of these without some Web 2.0 cynicism/snark. So I’ll offer up Conan O’Brien’s painfully accurate Twitter Tracker, and this lovely Social Media Venn Diagram t-shirt.

More interesting articles from the last week or so……

The Comment Is King
A look at comments left on articles in The Washington Post and Slate, which does not bode well for those of us interested in creating commenting systems for science articles.

Will Wolfram make bioinformatics obsolete?
Interesting piece on the potential for Wolfram Alpha to be used as a much easier interface for bioinformatics questions.

Clay Shirky Debunks the WSJ’s “Bloggers For Hire” Feature
The increasingly ubiquitous Clay Shirky does a detailed analysis of Mark Penn’s Wall Street Journal article claiming that there are hordes of people who make their living blogging. Shirky’s pretty much shreds the poorly researched nonsense to pieces.

Too much free
Seth Godin notes that giving away your book or e-book (or whatever) for free is losing its novelty value as a marketing technique.

Wikipedia hoax points to limits of journalists’ research
Two good points made here. 1) Wikipedia is completely untrustworthy, and 2) newspapers continue to hasten their own doom by lowering the quality of journalism they perform.

Kindle wrap-up
New Kindle was announced this week, bigger, even more absurdly expensive, still black and white (which makes it a non-starter for textbooks). Hard to understand why students who are pretty much required to have laptops these days would want an extra big bulky device to lug around as well.
The Kindle Lets Amazon Make a Lot From the Few
Speculation on the Kindle’s business model. Steve Jobs was right, not enough people read to make lots of money selling a device, but Amazon thinks that small group of people will buy lots and lots of e-books, which is where the profit lies.
Publishers Nurture Rivals to Kindle
Meanwhile, publishers are unhappy with Amazon, looking to avoid turning control of their industry over to one company and repeating the mistake the music industry made in ceding control to Apple.

Google book settlement has librarians worried
Librarians weigh in on the increasingly problematic Google Book Settlement.

The Extreme Google Brain
Google’s lead designer left the company recently, and caused a stir with his revelations of how anti-design the company seems to be. This analysis looks at the extreme personality types that thrive in places like Google, and I couldn’t resist this vicious and hilarious description:

My impression of “Googlers,” which I concede is based on little direct knowledge and is prejudicial on its face, is one of undersocialized, uncultured, pampered, arrogant faux-savants who have cultivated an arrested adolescence that the Google working environment further nurtures. Their computer-programming skills, the sole skills valued by the company, camouflage the flaws of their neuroanatomy. Their brains are beautifully suited to the genteel eugenics program that is the Google hiring process but are broken for real-world use.

Haven’t done one of these for a while, so here’s a few recent bookmarks of interest:

Kindle Failings Serve as Early Warning
I’ve got a new gig, well, sort of. I’ve been invited to join the crew at the Scholarly Kitchen, so I’ll be posting there occasionally when I have something relevant to say. My first post was a summary of who I am and what I’ve written about over here. This is my first original post over there, on worries about DRM and how we’re conditioning e-book buyers to act like illegal music downloaders.

America’s Newest Profession: Bloggers for Hire
The Wall Street Journal’s Mark Penn writes a laughably implausible article on how all us bloggers are getting rich. Makes me want to load up the truck and move to Beverly. The comments on his article set him straight, as have other bloggers.

Ford Bets the Fiesta on Social Networking
Ford gives 100 “millenials” a car and makes them Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr about their experiences. Do companies really expect efforts like this to work? If only they’d read this article first, This is how Social Media really works:

So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need “social media marketing” after all.

And finishing up with some follow-up to my recent Twitter rant, we have Maureen Dowd calling Twitter, “a toy for bored celebrities and high-school girls” (found via The Intersection), web-strategist Jeremiah Owyang predicting that alpha-geek early adopters will move on to the next thing as Twitter enters the mainstream, and best of all, the genius of Keith Starky Explains Twitter an in-depth analysis of what Twitterers are really saying with the medium.

I sort of feel like this blog has taken a negative turn as of late–I’ve been busier shooting down what I see as hype and impracticality lately than I have been at presenting positive suggestions. With that in mind, AJ Cann at the Science of the Invisible blog has given us the following homework assignment:

Compare and contrast Crotty’s “Magical Thinking” response to open content with Ellis’ attitudes to “(Selling) content in a networked age“. From the perspective of a contemporary observer, use these examples to illustrate the “content wars” of the early 21st century and explain how our present concept of ownership emerged.

So here’s my essay to complete the assignment. Hopefully this will be graded on a curve. Since I’m just auditing this course, I’m going to ignore the second half of the assignment on “content wars” (there’s a loaded phrase just waiting to inflame the passionate) and concentrate on comparing and contrasting the articles:

The two articles are philosophically similar. They share a common message, that giving away the fruits of one’s labors in a haphazard and thoughtless manner is not sustainable. Both argue that authors and publishers should see some reward for their work. Crotty’s essay is more limited, he’s merely pointing out the impracticalities of the “everything should be free” argument, while Ellis’ is more forward-thinking in suggesting ways that some material can be given away freely in order to generate even greater financial recompense for the author’s work. It should be pointed out that in other blog entries, Crotty, like Ellis, suggests that new business models and new ways of handling content should be experimented with. Crotty, in fact, runs a scientific journal that is performing a set of those experiments (discussed below).

Though Crotty’s piece is more limited, it does not suffer some of the weaknesses of Ellis’. Ellis’ essay is reminiscent of this piece in some ways, he’s describing a problem that’s fairly obvious, but doesn’t offer practical solutions other than to try a bunch of stuff and maybe some of it will work. That’s a common thread seen these days in the blogosphere and there’s not a whole lot that’s new offered by Ellis. Original thinking is needed here to invent new business models, and merely pointing out that experimentation is necessary is not terribly insightful. “Free PDFs/Paid books” is not a viable option for a scientific journal, where the lifeblood is the pdf itself. Ellis suggests that experiments need to take place in a manner where their results can be directly measured, but this is easier said than done, and again, no practical solutions are offered. Often it’s difficult to directly correlate a marketing activity with sales activity. For an example, at CSH Protocols, we make a portion of our articles freely available each month. These articles certainly see a higher readership than most (but not all) of our subscriber-only articles. But do they lead to increased institutional subscriptions? It’s hard to say. We’re certainly steadily increasing our subscriber base, but there’s no way to measure the direct effect of the free articles on this. I suppose we could eliminate the free articles for a period and look for a decrease in subscription uptake, but that seems like shooting ourselves in the foot just to prove a point (or to mix a metaphor).

So what are Crotty and colleagues at CSHL Press doing that’s a positive approach despite all of his negative articles on why other people are wrong? Let’s take a look at the journal he currently runs, Cold Spring Harbor Protocols. First off, the journal itself is an experiment, an attempt to move a 30-plus year scientific manual publishing program out of the print world and into the electronic world. CSHL Press has long been well-known for the high quality laboratory manuals published, but younger students are less likely to seek experimental methods on the lab’s bookshelf, they want to find them online. Hence, the journal was created in mid-2006. Taking advantage of the electronic medium, the protocols in the journal are regularly updated when needed, and all share a common database of cautions and recipes that are under constant revision.

CSH Protocols also experiments heavily with giving away content for free. Approximately 10% of the total journal content is made permanently freely available to all readers, suscribers and non-subscribers alike. Each month, two articles are chosen as “featured articles” by the editor and these are available to all. As noted above, it’s unclear how this has affected subscriptions, though it’s probably safe to say that it hasn’t hurt them. At the same time, it’s increased the size of our readership (the free articles are usually read more often than most subscription-only articles), increased the number of places linking to the journal (which helps for Google rankings), and increased the readership of subscription-only articles that are linked within the free articles (this is a good example, as the related articles linked within see high levels of activity). The increased readership is good for impressing potential advertisers, and it certainly doesn’t hurt when trying to sell the journal to librarians.

Further free distribution happens with the print version of CSH Protocols. A limited print run of copies of each issue are generated, and these are given away freely as promotional items at all Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory meetings, and in the CSHL Press booth at other meetings.

The other big experiment happening with CSH Protocols is the revenue-sharing relationship between the publisher and the authors. Writing up experimental methods is not an immediate priority for most researchers. Data-driven papers reporting results are the heart and soul of an academic or industry career, and that’s always going to come first. In creating the journal, we were looking for ways to help motivate scientists to write up their methods for us. Our efforts have taken several different approaches. First, CSH Protocols has no page charges and no charges for the use of color. Authors do not have to pay to publish in the journal. Second, we offer an intense level of editorial support. Since the journal comes from our manual publishing program, we’re trying to maintain the same high standards of quality that built our reputation in our books. When you put together a lab manual, you want all the protocols to follow a common, easy-to-use format, and to be as complete and clear as possible. To keep things at this high level, all articles in CSH Protocols go through extensive developmental editing. We even go so far in some cases as to take an author’s rough step-by-step lab notes for doing a method and rework it into our article format for completion by the author. Both these things increase our editorial overhead, but we feel they lead to better quality submissions and better quality final articles. They’re the kinds of things a publisher can do to add value to an author’s work, the kinds of things that make paying a subscription worthwhile for the readers. When one is competing against free resources, quality is an area where one can certainly stand out from the alternatives.

But most importantly, CSH Protocols pays authors a royalty based on the usage of their articles. Each article has been tagged for the set of authors, and each year, a portion of subscription revenue similar to the royalty percentage paid a book author is set aside. This amount is divided based on each article’s percentage of total use on the site (full text access only, we don’t include abstract reads). Often this doesn’t amount to a huge royalty, we’ve paid some authors less than $10 for a year’s royalties (though to be fair, those articles are usually the ones published late in a calendar year so they don’t have time to accumulate reads). But for some authors, articles generate several hundred dollars per year. That may not seem like much to a high end PI, but for a graduate student living on a stipend, it’s a lovely thing. It’s not clear how much of a motivating factor the royalties are, but we have had quite a number of repeat authors. I’d be willing to bet the lack of page charges is more significant in authors agreeing to write for us, but the royalty check once a year is a nice reminder to think about other methods they could publish.

So, to wrap up this lengthy assay, the authors of both pieces seem to have much in common with their approaches to the future of publishing. While Crotty comes off as a naysaying curmudgeon, and Ellis offers positive thoughts about pathways into the future, Crotty is actually doing the experimentation that Ellis vaguely suggests, and is attempting to try innovative new ways of scholarly publishing. Or so he hopes. He’s gotten a little full of himself and is now referring to himself in the third person. AJ, this is your fault for assigning this essay, and I hope you can live with the consequences.

What at first seemed to be an odd April Fool’s joke turned out to be real–the Journal of Visual Explanations (JOVE) has gone from an open access publishing model to a closed access subscription model. No official statement was made, but on Noah Gray’s blog, JOVE’s Moishe Pritsker made the following statement:

“We (JoVE) are changing our model, and from now will provide our content under subscription. Until now it was all for free.

The reason is simple: we have to survive. To cover costs of our operations, to break even, we have to charge $6,000 per video article. This is to cover costs of the video-production and technological infrastructure for video-publication, which are higher than in traditional text-only publishing. Academic labs cannot pay $6,000 per article, and therefore we have to find other sources to cover the costs.

As much as I would like to continue to provide our content for free, JoVE has to survive. I believe the world would be a better place having a video-publication under subscription than not having a video-publication at all.”

More details can be found on this Friendfeed thread:

“…we are indeed closing access. Not an April Fool’s joke. We’ve been trying to get universities to subscribe to us, but nobody seems to be taking us seriously and, given our situation, being free is just not sustainable.”

I can’t say I’m terribly surprised. JOVE set themselves a monumental task, trying to break ground with a new type of science publishing AND at the same time trying to do so with an unproven business model. Doing both together was perhaps a bit too ambitious. I can think of several reasons why open access wasn’t going to cut it for them:
1) their insistence on high production values–the only journals I know that are sustainable/profitable using an author-pays open access model are those that emphasize high quantities of publication and minimal editorial oversight and support. By striving for high production values, JOVE added significant editorial overhead and costs.
2) A large number of JOVE’s publications are demonstrations of techniques. As the editor of a methods journal, I’m painfully aware of the “second-class citizen” attitude most scientists take toward writing up methods. Obviously data papers are the bread and butter of the working scientist–that’s where they’re going to advance their careers. Methods papers are a nice addendum, but they are not a priority. It’s hard to get scientists to write up methods, and much of my time is spent trying to commission articles. At CSH Protocols, we go so far as to pay our authors a royalty as an incentive for writing up methods for publication with us. I find it hard to believe that there will be very many willing to not only spend the time to put together a video of a method, but willing to pay JOVE’s costs to do so.

And so the economic realities seem to have hit home. I wish the best to JOVE, the folks I’ve met from the journal are all smart, nice people and their experiment is an intriguing one. I worry though, that so much of their support and hype came from the small but very vocal group of open access proponents so prevalent online. This shift in business models may not be taken very well by that community.

Given that today is April 1, which is always a good day to avoid the internet (so many attempts to be funny and clever, so few successes), I was surprised to come across two of the more perceptive articles on science publishing that I’ve seen for quite a while. If you got all your information from the science blogosphere, you’d be under the impression that all publishers are inherently evil, that they add no value whatsoever to anything, that scientists have an infinite supply of free time and that they’ll happily pitch in and do all of your work for you. So it was nice to see Larry Moran’s latest blog entry where he talks about the really hard (and expensive) work that goes into creating a textbook.

Moran cites a recent PLOS book review, where Sean Eddy takes the “information wants to be free” crowd to task for what he calls “magical thinking”:

“A more utopian “open” advocacy simply denies this real-world tension. Information wants to be free; corporations are evil; people will make great stuff for love not money; free stuff will save the developing world; we’ll pay for it with taxes and charity. You don’t have to subscribe to Ayn Rand’s brand of laissez-faire capitalism to have serious problems with this. It amounts to claiming that intellectual work doesn’t take time, or that time isn’t worth money—that intellectual property protections exist only to create profit for unnecessary middlemen, not to enable the work of talented professionals who create works that can be readily copied.”

The review discusses a new book on open education resources, and Eddy notes how woefully inadequate so many of them are, primarily because it takes time, effort and money to turn rough class notes into a truly useful educational tool:

“Nonetheless, when I actually went to these sites, it became clear how far they have to go before they can compete with a good book. Too many resources I saw were sketchy, incomplete, and unsatisfying…Distributing open-source software or open-access literature is only a matter of attaching an open license to a finished product, but most of an educator’s course materials are rarely a finished, free-standing work. Course materials are more usually fragmentary, cobbled-together aide-mémoires that only make sense in the context of face time in the course. A lot of work must go into each piece of content to raise it to the quality of textbook material, and yet more work is required to have the material best use the interactive capabilities of the Web.”

Moran takes up this theme to discuss his own textbook:

“Life is never as simple as the Web 2.0 fans make out. Somebody is going to have to do a lot of work before the quality of a website matches what’s in the best introductory textbooks. And it’s extremely naive to think that all that work is just going to be given away for free.

I’m not just talking about authors. There’s a whole team of people involved in publishing my textbooks. This includes editors who correct my spelling and grammar—an onerous task in my case. It includes artists who make the figures and editors who obtain permissions and copyrights for photographs. Then there’s the staff at the publishers who receive and mail out manuscripts for review and editing and who handle all the paperwork/electrons associated with a major project.

Are we going to ask all of them to work for free by putting everything on the web? Of course not.”

Of all the books I’ve worked on at CSHL Press, the textbooks are by far the most time-consuming, and the hardest to do well. A really well-done textbook takes an inordinate amount of editorial oversight. For example, taking chapters written by multiple authors and editing them so there’s a consistent voice throughout the entire book is no easy task. You want all of the illustrations to be done in the same style, again for consistency so a student can extrapolate between chapters, and that means hiring an illustrator for the book. These are just a few tiny factors in the big picture–a lot of hard work goes into creating a good textbook, and the people involved should see some recompense for that work.

Now, you can argue that the textbook market is a strange place, to be sure, and that big corporate publshers often do shady things in that market in the name of increased profit. And that there are some awful textbooks out there. No argument here. But expecting to replace all the hard work done on a textbook with some fuzzy entity called “the crowd” who will be doing the work out of the kindness of its heart, and thinking you’ll end up with as high quality a textbook as one put together by talented professionals is ludicrous. More from Eddy:

“Many technologists today are infected with an idea that “community is king,” that high-quality content will rain down freely merely because we connect digital communities openly. This confuses ways of sharing ideas with ways of creating ideas. It is a kind of magical thinking that has much in common with the cargo cults that cut landing strips in the jungle and carved radios from sticks in hope that more sophisticated beings would parachute technological artifacts down upon them.”

Talented people who work hard deserve to get paid for that work.

Addendum--note the comment on Moran’s blog from “anonymous” who suggests Moran just get a government grant to make his textbook free. Now, I’m sure all you scientist out there know how easy it is to procure government grants these days, right? And where does that government grant money come from anyway?

Addendum 2–how’s that textbook crowdsourcing effort in Texas working out?

As I explained last year, Cold Spring Harbor Protocols is something of an experiment as a publishing business model. Because some of our articles come from our lab manuals, where we owe authors and editors royalties, we chose to extend those royalty payments to authors of new, original articles. Writing up methods is usually not a priority for most scientists, they’re more focused on data-driven papers. We wanted to provide a nice incentive for authors to 1) write up their methods and 2) publish them with us, rather than other journals who don’t offer such incentives. We’re not talking about huge amounts of money, but as I recall from my graduate student days, every little bit helps. If I could have published a paper AND gotten some cash for a night on the town, I would have been thrilled.

The way it works is that each year we set aside a percentage of our subscription revenue for the journal. This total amount continues to grow as the journal’s subscription base continues to grow–and we’re happy to report that CSH Protocols is seeing a lot of uptake by the scientific community. That sum is then divided among all authors based on the usage of individual articles. Original articles generated a range from around $3 (for an article published right at the end of the year, with little time to accumulate readership) to one of our most-read articles, which will result in a payment of $367 for the author (our top original paper author wrote a set of two papers and will receive just over $600).

So, if you wrote an article for us that was published in 2008, you should expect to see a check in the mail in the next few weeks. We hope that this revenue sharing is a nice bonus for the hard work you put into your article and that this serves as an incentive to write up more methods for publication. And if you haven’t yet published with us, what are you waiting for?

There’s been a rash lately of articles and blog entries pleading with scientists to enter the blogosphere. One disturbing aspect of this has been how many of them have been written by various aspects of the Nature Publishing Group. Three recent articles (here, here and here) all make the case that scientists should start writing blogs because science journalism is on the wane, and that science blogs can fill the void left behind for educating the general public about science. Coincidentally, Nature just happens to run one of the biggest centers for science blogging. Does their desire to have this venture grow and succeed have any influence whatsoever on their opinions about the need for scientists to take on this extra workload? From Nature’s own ethical guidelines:

“In the interests of transparency and to help readers to form their own judgements of potential bias, Nature journals require the authors of most articles to declare any competing financial interests in relation to the work described…”

Interesting how that applies to authors but apparently not to their own editorials.

Now, as to the meat of the subject matter presented–are science blogs going to replace science journalism? I have my doubts, which I’ll explain below. The whole thing reminded me of Clay Shirky’s recent article, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable. While I’ve strongly disagreed with Shirky in the past, I thought this was a perceptive piece, and I particularly liked the open-endedness of his argument. Essentially what Shirky says is that things break quickly, then it takes a while for something new to develop to replace those things. There’s not an immediate fix on the horizon for our disappearing newspapers. I like that instead of the usual vague cliches most Web 2.0-proponents spout for suggestions on how to proceed, Shirky leaves the question up in the air and doesn’t try to pretend there’s an obvious answer:

“No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.”

The one caveat I’d add is that the article assumes that good journalism is something our society values enough to preserve, which may be more of an open question. Sometimes things don’t get fixed after a revolution, they get worse. Time will tell.

That said, some thoughts on why science blogging is a poor substitute for science journalism:

1) Journalism is a real profession that requires training and a difficult to master skill set when done properly, as I discussed in this posting. Scientists, and science bloggers are not trained in that skill set. One can certainly make the argument that what passes for science journalism these days is far from ideal, but replacing it with something equally flawed does not strike me as an improvement.

2) Aside from the obvious problems with newspapers’ economic models, the reason journalism is on the wane is the dropping quality. Newspapers have systematically tried to cut costs over recent years, placing economic pressures on reporters. This has resulted in much of what passes for journalism becoming regurgitation of press releases (see Churnalism). Given that many science blog entries are just links to other articles, isn’t this much the same thing? Furthermore, if the nature of so many blogs (often including this one) is to provide links and commentary on original published works, what are bloggers going to write about if those original stories no longer exist? Do away with published news articles about science and you do away with a huge chunk of the subject matter of the science blogosphere.

3) The other big problem with the current state of journalism is the substitution of opinion for factual reporting. As noted here:

“Journalists report much less than they used to, and much less than they should, as the papers have switched over to a reliance on columnists and opinion.”

I can’t think of a single blog that I’ve ever read that wasn’t opinionated. Blogs are more like the editorial page of a newspaper than the front page.

4) As Larry Moran recently pointed out, most scientists are never going to blog. Reading and writing blogs appeals to a limited percentage of people in general, scientists being no different. Start with the subset of scientists deeply interested in communication, education and outreach, and then remove those who don’t enjoy the blogging process and you’re left with science bloggers. Factor in Jakob Nielsen’s 90-9-1 rule (online content is created by 1% of users, 9% occasionally contribute a little, 90% never contribute) and you’re talking about a tiny fraction of scientists. Does this give a balanced view of science? Anyone who regularly reads science blogs can quickly point out some of the general biases and viewpoints held by most of the blogosphere. Remember also that those doing really interesting research, the people you’d most like to hear from, are the least likely to blog. They’re too busy doing that research.

5) The world of science blogging is filled with navel-gazing. I think this is one of the main reasons you don’t see the mainstream of scientists writing or reading science blogs. The vast majority of blog articles I see are either about blogging (or other online communication tools) or about what other bloggers are doing/blogging about. Another big chunk is about life as a scientist. Then there’s a small percentage of posts about actual science. All this is great for building community and feeling a part of a connected group, but I’m not sure how interested the general science reading public is going to be in these cliques.

Phew. I seem to have quite a few rants in me as of late. Bottom line, let’s all keep blogging. It’s fun (at least for those of us who are into it) and no doubt it serves a solid educational purpose and opens lines of communication between scientists and between scientists and non-scientists. But I don’t expect it to become a required activity for most scientists. And let’s be honest about what it really is. The majority of these enjoyable personal diaries and spaces for voicing our opinions are a far cry from well-researched, well-written professional journalism. And I’m with Shirky on this one. New business models and new forms of communication will emerge to continue the process of journalism. We just haven’t seen them yet.

Edited to add–the one point I forgot to add. It’s interesting that the tools that were originally being sold to us as a means for scientists to interact, to troubleshoot techniques and experiments, to find collaborations, are now being pitched as a means for scientists to educate the general public. I always thought the original plans were a bit far-fetched (if every graduate student starts posting daily blog entries about their experiments, who’s going to read them all, let alone offer advice?), and it goes to show you that no matter what your intentions when you create a tool, users often find it better suited for something else. Which I guess explains why a tool created to help college students know their fellow students is now used by grandparents to show pictures of children to their former high school classmates.