The web gets social, an editorial in the new issue of Nature Materials. Excerpt: '[A]lthough almost every corner of society is adopting RSS, blogs and other 'disruptive' technologies, scientists, and physical scientists, in particular, seem reluctant to embrace them....Connotea (an open source software developed by the Nature Publishing Group) and Cite-U-Like are 'social bookmarking' services. They are academic clones of the popular general public services Del.icio.us and its photo-sharing counterpart Flickr. With one click a scientist can store any URL or reference on Connotea, where they are publicly visible on the web. As a perk, the software goes off to publisher sites, finds associated metadata for the link such as author names, and displays this. Taking sharing further, users tag papers with whatever they feel best describes the article, for example, 'cold plastic deformation' or 'residual stress'. As more users use such services, they begin to discover that the clicking on the tag 'cold plastic deformation' now brings up papers not only just posted by you but by others. In this way communities and resource discovery develops. But as with ArXiv, eBay, or any service that depends on user input, the more use it, the more valuable it becomes. Intense competition means, however, that researchers are often loathe to use such tools. They don't want competitors to see what they are reading. Yet the value of greater sharing is obvious. In particular in cutting across disciplinary boundaries. Sharing nurtures serendipity. RSS is also much more than just an alerting service. Its real power kicks in when it is considered in the context of social software such as blogs and social bookmarking services. RSS allows you to find information. Blogs and tools such as Connotea and Cite-U-Like allow you to store information, and more importantly to share it with others in new ways. RSS then comes full circle, allowing you again to keep abreast of changes made by others to blogs or Connotea tags you are keeping an eye on. It's a sort of collaborative glue, like that Berners-Lee first had in mind....Scientists should not shirk from stepping outside the formal publishing system....Researchers should be leading the use of innovative tools, instead of lagging behind.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/01/2005 05:27:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
