I recently found a nice little article on Science Commons highlighting James Boyle's recent column "The irony of a web without science." James Boyle's article provides a critical perspective on how science, which requires great deals of collaboration, is reported predominantly within the closed, firewalled environments provided by scientific journals. He notes that the cost for a scientific journal subscription is astronomical - on the order of $20,000 - barring most average users from even reading the material. Boyle outlines the problem:
"The world wide web was designed in a scientific laboratory to facilitate access to scientific knowledge. In every other area of life - commerce, social networking, pornography - it has been a smashing success. But in the world of science itself? With the virtues of an open web all around us, we have proceeded to build an endless set of walled gardens, something that looks a lot like Compuserv or Minitel and very little like a world wide web for science."
The Science Commons article points out that "open" content such as scientific literature is a prerequisite for "[an] almost-mythical 'e-research' world" to which Boyle alludes and for which the Science Commons strives. The "e-research" world that they envision is similar to something like open office or linux, where hordes of philanthropical programmers devote large portions of their time to a product that is designed to be free for all.
Access to historical scientific content is certainly necessary for any form of “e-research” to prosper. However, this does not excuse scientists - most of whom have access to this content - for the current lack of scientific, internet-generated content on the web. In my understanding of copyright law (which I will admit, is meager) discussions concerning the contents of copyrighted scientific articles are considered a fair use of the material and are perfectly legal, even in an internet “published” domain such as a forum or a wiki. The number of legitimate scientific forums on the internet, however, remains sparse at best with the notable exception of arXiv.org.
So what is holding people back? Are scientists - the type of people who created the internet - ignorant of its power to facilitate communication? I don’t think so. Rather, I think many scientists are afraid that their original ideas - part of what they get paid for - will not be credited in an environment where “publishing” has little perceived authority, and anonymity of the audience is the norm. Fix these two problems and I think “e-research” has a much better chance at realizing its potential.
What I propose, and will be working on in the future, is a community based upon blogs of a new variety. Members of the community, reviewers and originators of ideas, will be responsible for the upkeep of their own personal blogs. The articles posted in originators' blogs will be in the form of wiki articles, where readers can comment on the article and any changes made to the article can be tracked throughout time. The main difference, however is that only the originator of the article will be able to edit the article. This will provide originators "ownership" to ideas which I think is important if e-research is ever to succeed.
The community's home page will act as its social center containing a forum that creates threads automatically every time a new article from the local blogosphere is generated. The forum will effectively advertise new and interesting articles and, in doing so, advertise the originators' blogs. Comments made on an article in a blog will appear as replies in the traditional sense of a forum, bringing the thread "to the top" and into the public spotlight.
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