"Science 2.0" was a concept introduced several years ago to describe the next wave of science. We don't know what it is (or what it should be), but it definitely will be more advanced and probably more internet-based. Science will be changed by the technological advances and sociological changes, but how exactly is not clear. It seems that tomorrow's science will involve five basic features: (1) comments at the web sites of online journals, (2) community exchange hubs, (3) personal blogs, (4) brainstorming hubs, and (5) online networking hubs.
1) Commenting at online journals. Critical commenting can increase the quality of science. It would be in many cases anonymous, but that is OK. Why? Well, you have to be honest (because you are the scientist), but then disclosing your real name in most cases is not compatible with the anonymous peer-review system. An additional argument for anonymous commenting is that the most authoritative online collaborative tool (Wikipedia) is anonymous, while attempts to create analogous non-anonymous tools such as Google knol have failed so far. (It is still OK to have non-anonymous personal blogs as detailed below, but blogs are ego-centric and can not provide a real scientific community hub).
2) Community forums. Historically, online discussions started from mailing lists (now rarely used) and forums (still actively used today). There are several successful forums in the field of molecular biology:
- http://biology-online.org (~20,000 members, as of April 2010)
- http://protocol-online.org (~ 15,000 members, as of April 2010)
- http://molecularstation.com (~10,000 members)
- http://biotechniques.com (~10,000 members)
- http://seqanswers.com (~5.000 members)
- http://molbiol.ru (~10,000 members).
- http://forum.generegulation.info (We are here :) currently it is used just for specific projects, but you can have a look)
- more forums are listed here
3) Personal blogs. Personal blogs now tend to aggregate into large systems of peer-reviewed (!) or semi peer-reviewed blogging communities. Below are the links to main hubs of scientific blogs.
- http://www.scientificblogging.com - allows registering new blogs (~2,500 contributors, as of May 2010)
- http://blogs.nature.com - Nature blogroll - they accept applications for new blog listings (~670 blogs, as of March 2009)
- http://researchblogging.org - existing bloggers may register their blogs (~350 blogs, as of March 2009)
- http://www.scienceblog.com - new bloggers may register (~250 reader's posts, as of March 2009)
- http://scienceblogs.com - over 60 bloggers selected by the site owners are running their scientific blogs here.
- http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science - a blog by the editors of Scientific American (magazine).
- http://postgenomic.com - they collect posts from hundreds of (manually selected?) blogs
4) Brainstorming hubs. Currently there are not many of them, probably because the methodology has yet to be developed. A couple of nice examples are listed below:
- http://innocentive.com - offer money for the solution of commercially relevant scientific problems
- http://www.ninesigma.com - directly connect solution providers and solution seekers
5) Scientific (social) networking. This is a trend in online science, which follows a general trend of social networking on the web. A large list of such sites can be found here.
The analysis of existing online-science will follow later; meanwhile, you can send me other links.
PS. Here is more discussion on this topic. Tim Berners-Lee, the person who invented the World Wide Web 30 years ago, is now advertising the idea of a new web -- the web of open, linked data. "It's good to blog" -- say recent editorial articles in Nature and Nature Methods. A critic immediately followed in the editorial from CSH Protocols. So this is being actively discussed. Below are several example blog posts about scientific blogging:
- April 28, 2009: Jean-Claude Bradley. Is it becoming dangerous to NOT blog?
- April 28, 2009: Richard L. Apodaca. Scientific Blogging: Ignore It and Be Ignored?
- September 04, 2009: David D. Perlmutter. Facebooking for the Tenure Track
- October 06, 2009: David Stuart, Web 2.0 fails to excite today's researchers
