The state of the Science Blogosphere - In reply to Bora
Bora wrote a post on science blogging were he argues that blog carnivals seam to be slowly morphing into blog journals including some aspects of the editorial and review processes that go on in science journals. The response was growing a bit long so I post it on the blog instead.
When we started Bio::Blogs, some 10 months ago, I though one day the submissions could grow to a rate were it would be reasonable to create a limit. Once a limit is established selection quicks in and the carnival would slowly morph into a journal. Even without the selection, there is already some sort of review process since people tend to send links to things that were either already popular within the blog or something they found interesting in other blogs.
Unfortunately the size of the bioinformatics blogosphere is not growing significantly. Several new blogs have appeared but other bloggers have stopped posting. I am not sure if this is true for most science related blogs or just the particular case of bioinformatics. Postgenomic keeps track of the number of active blogs and blog posts, and at least there, it looks like were are holding steady at around 400 science blogs active per week since November last year (see picture below).
The blogs tracked by Postgenomic have to be submitted or picked up by Stew so there are surely many more science blogs that are not being tracked in this service. In fact Technorati lists around 20 000 blogs tagged as science. Given that it is in the best interest of the bloggers to tag their blogs very broadly to attract a wider audience, Technorati surely includes many blogs that are not really science related. This number is also inflated by duplicated blogs of people that moved from one blogging platform to another and blogs that have been created but are not active. So the real number of active science blogs is somewhere between 400 and 20000.
If you have a science blog (or know of a science blog) that is not tracked by Postgenomic, submit it by email (instructions on the site).
Also, even if there are some great quality posts, very few people are posting new data (that I know of). There is almost no open science going on. There are great examples but so far with limited impact. As Bora states:
"Scientists, as a whole, are very reluctant to write novel ideas, hypotheses or data on blogs, and are very slow to test the waters of Open, Source Publishing. Most of what one finds on science blogs is commentary on other peoples' ideas, hypotheses and data found in journals and mass media."
Nevertheless, judging by a recent story in The Scientist and an article in Nature Jobs, science blogs are now taken more seriously. Blogging is finally getting perceived just has a means of communication (for the best and the worst) and no longer something that the MySpace kids do.
What will take other people to join in blogging and publishing their science openly? I think examples will drive it. The success of OpenWetWare is a tremendously good example. Soon I hope to see some papers getting published by open science projects like Usefulchem. If community projects running in similar models as open source development are truly a more efficient way to produce knowledge then examples of successful projects will be the best way to get other people to participate.
Going back to the blog carnivals. I would suggest two concrete changes: 1) stop calling them blog carnivals, call them blog journals instead; 2) have a PDF version for offline reading.
Both things bring the carnival closer to the model of publishing we are used to seeing. There has been a PDF version of Bio::Blogs (inspired by the 1st Science Anthology) for the last two editions and they are being downloaded significantly. The PDF for the April edition has been downloaded around 40 times (in 5 days). Not bad for a such a specific field. There is a bit of a hassle to get the permissions every month but it is worth while.
I don't think in any way that blog journals should replace traditional science publishing. They serve a place in a less formal layer of science communication. They also bring some order and quality control to the very chaotic and fast flow nature of blogs.
Further reading by other bloggers:
Idea for Discussion: An Academic Blog Review
Science Blogging, Blog Carnivals and Secondary Publishing
Thursday, April 05, 2007
Posted by Pedro Beltrão at 4:05 PM
Labels: blog carnivals, open science
7 comments:
Perhaps it takes some time for a carnival to get established and for a topical blogo-knot of the sphere to become big enough. Perhaps Bio::Blogs needs to survive another few months or so, but I am sure that the old biggies like Tangled Bank, Grand Rounds, Skeptic's Circle, I And The Birds or Circus of the Spineless could go this way IF THE PEOPLE involved want to see it go this way. Some may prefer to keep it informal.
Putting everything into PDF also means more work for the Manager of the carnival as not all hosts are willing or know how to turn it into a PDF document.
There may be a push to do away with rotating hosting - and that is exactly what makes some of the carnivals alive: the motivation to be a host as it brings lots of hits from links by Pharyngula and many other places. The hits are not limited to just a couple of days, either, as this is a gift that keeps on giving. Every new neuroblogger, once s/he encounters Encephalon will go to the Archives and look at a number of older issues. Would a centralized hosting and a PDF format be as motivating as the prospect of mega-traffic and exposure?
Personally, I can live without hits from Pharyngula.
I'm not sure I agree that all blog carnivals are/can/should evolve towards blog journals. I think they are two different ideas. To me, host rotation is a defining feature of a carnival.
Bio::Blogs is perhaps more suited to the journal format. As I've mentioned before, I don't think that computational biology lends itself as well to blogging as other areas of biology because (a) there are not many computational biology blogs and (b) its practitioners tend to prefer a terse, brief communication style (they're programmers, not essayists).
Pedro's continued enthusiasm for Bio::Blogs is great and I hope we find a working format for it. It's still getting attention and is popular in the community, even if contributions from others are lacking.
hummmmm, you open a fondamental question about communication and hiuman relation in science particularly. I'm new to blogging myself, like most researchers, i never thought there is a something major going on out there :). This has nothing to do with the blog way of doing, it's because of the scientific education we get of doing things. First, Scientific Processes are slow, and new technologies are not changing that. It seems even slower compared to blog time scale. Second, Few scientist ( I spoke about phD level scientist) get courses in communications and phylosophy nor history of science. This is the most important part of science to learn. As a scientist, you need to be able to relate what you are doing at the bench to the rest of the world at some point. Blogs indeed is a way of connecting people that "forced" scientist to exchange their views with the rest of humanity( in a sense).
I can see also that being a scientist today looks more like a employee in an administration where you spend your time doing useless things. This tends to make scientist doing something else than blogging about science after work.
I created my blog last month : "DNA MANIA" because science needs ideas and ideas are not restricted to institutional way nor they are now the privilege of a few.
Frédéric
I just want to clear up my suggestion on not calling them blog carnivals anymore. I was not saying that carnivals should not rotate their hosts. This is great to find out about new blogs. I was just saying that the name could change from blog carnival to blog journal (or something else). It took about 2-3 years to get the idea across that blogs are more than personal diaries.
It would be shame to take the same amount to time to shift the perception of a carnival from something like a vanity link fest to something useful as a periodic newsletter, a roundup of interesting science related posts.
Thanks Frederic for your interest. Here is the link to your new blog.
Pedro,
I think there will continue to be a lot of confusion about the meaning of terms like blogs, carnivals, journals (and even science) since these terms are used in ever evolving contexts. Since the terms are so fuzzy we have to be persistent in explaining what we are trying to do as authors to various audiences in the hope that the intended communication occurs.
When I looked at your announcements for the carnivals I didn't think that the content on the UsefulChem blog was sufficiently geared towards the general audience for which I assumed it was geared. If I was wrong about that I would be happy submit next time. And based on the feedback from my readers I started to include more posts for a broader audience and some of these are reposted on ScientificBlogging.com
This is really what is so powerful about blogs (and wikis) - they are extremely flexible vehicles for communication. And they are desperately needed in science to fill a vacuum not occupied by traditional journals, conferences or any other existing medium. Where else can a researcher immediately post raw data, speculation, rebuttals, opinions and yes, even fully interpreted experiments?
A nice discussion of an interesting topic, Pedro. As you say scientific blogging is receiving a lot of attention, and what you might expect is more scientists becoming involved.
I see blogging as an exciting field to participate in. Scientific journals don't offer the opportunity for expression that a blog does. Of course, one could argue that the lack of a review process, leads to a lot of rubbish. But that's the web in general, not something confined to blogging.
I would like a blog to discuss my own research, but I don't for a number of reasons. One is that almost everyone in my department is disparaging of blogs: they aren't taken seriously. Nature might say that blogs are important, but I think it will take a while for this opinion to trickle down. Another reason is rather more abstract. The contract of becoming a scientist often dictates that all research is the intellectual property of the institution, so I'm not clear how publishing this on a personal (unaffiliated) blog would stand with respect to this.
So, instead, I run Bioinformatics Zen which still allows me to discuss issues I'm interested in. I just don't post my research on it. But I do think that scientific blogs, once proven, will become increasingly used. I don't really have a concrete reason to substantiate this. Just a gut feeling maybe - something else rather frowned on in science.
First of all, great post.
I tend to agree with Pedro and Neil, at least as it pertains to bio::blogs. The concept of a blog "journal" that functions as a summary of the fields best posts accompanied by appropriate editorialization definitely carries some appeal, and works well enough.
The approach of tangled bank, grand rounds and some of the others works because the audience is large and more general in some ways. Is that what bio:blogs aspires to be? I am not sure. The "carnival" moniker is a little unfortunate. It seems to represent somewhat of a free for all, and blog carnivals have ended up becoming a bit of a "me too" activity. That said, no one is stopping bioinformatics or computational biology bloggers from contributing to other carnivals.
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