Bill Hooker points to an initiative by Scientific American to help collaborative science. Mitch Waldrop on Science 2.0
I’m way behind on this, but anyway: a while back, writer Mitch Waldrop interviewed me and a whole bunch of other people interested in (what I usually call) Open Science, for an upcoming article in Scientific American. A draft of the article is now available for reading, but even better — in a wholly subject matter appropriate twist, it’s also available for input from readers. Quoth Mitch:
Welcome to a Scientific American experiment in “networked journalism,” in which readers — you –get to collaborate with the author to give a story its final form.The article, below, is a particularly apt candidate for such an experiment: it’s my feature story on “Science 2.0,” which describes how researchers are beginning to harness wikis, blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies as a potentially transformative way of doing science. The draft article appears here, several months in advance of its print publication, and we are inviting you to comment on it. Your inputs will influence the article’s content, reporting, perhaps even its point of view.
PMR: It a reasonably balanced article, touching many of the efforts mentioned in this blog. It’s under no illusions that this won’t be easy. I’ve just finished doing an interview where at the end I was asked what we would be like in 5 years’ time and I was rather pessismistic that the current metrics-based dystopia would persist and even get worse (The UK has increased its efforts on metrics-based assessment in which case almost any innovation, almost by definition, is discouraged). But on the other hand I think the vitality pf @2.0@ in so many areas may provide unstoppable disruption.