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Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Social networks for research require OA

John Wilbanks, No tenure for Technorati: Science and the Social Web, john wilbanks' blog, November 19, 2007.  Excerpt:

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Social Web and the Research Web. Last time out I stuck to the latter. But I see a lot of web 2.0 pushes into the sciences and it’s got me thinking…is science a good target for these technologies and social approaches?

Let’s start with a tautology. The wisdom of crowds depends on the existence of crowds.

And let’s take neuroscience as an example of a scientific discipline....Is the crowd [of neuroscience experts] big enough to be wise?  I am unconvinced....

There’s three barriers to Social Web extracting the wisdom in sciences as it does elsewhere.

The first is the lack of a crowd – not only is the total number of scientists in any one field pretty low in terms of internet numbers, but it’s even lower in reality with specialization....

(there is a secondary problem of scientists not wanting to be followed to waterholes – what a lab is reading is a very good clue as to its unpublished research, and labs like to keep that stuff secret, for good reason…it’s how you get the next paper, the next speech, and the next grant…)

Second problem is that scientific communication is a different beast than normal human communication....

[T]he problem is that people with common knowledge don’t share it with each other, simply because of social competition (and time constraints, but that’s for another post). It’s not a matter of “web 2.0 technology will trump old ways of sharing stuff” (a statement I tend to believe is true) but a matter of “stuff that doesn’t get shared anyway isn’t likely to get shared simply because the technology exists to share it.”

Put simply, if a scientist isn’t going to say it to her colleagues at a conference, she probably isn’t going to blog it.

Third problem is that there are no rewards for participating in these new forms of communication....

So if you put together these three problems – crowd’s too small, communication’s too formal, and no one gets rewarded – how do you overcome this to get Social Web’s very-real benefits into the sciences?

There’s a few places to start. Going in order for the problems…

1. Increase the size of the crowd. This starts with Open Access, I think. More people reading the source materials is simply the only way to go. We need to get away from the AOL/Prodigy/Walled Garden approach to the content. There’s people out there who can learn this, but not without access to the canon.

It also requires Research Web – the re-formatting of the scholarly canon so that it’s not just legally accessible as a set of PDFs, but something that can be endlessly manipulated, searched, indexed, mashed up, and more....

Right now the combination of publisher firewalls and underlying data formats is a choke point on Social Web utility here, because it just keeps anyone who isn’t already in the Science Guild on the outskirts.

2. Incentivize participation....