A conversation with Timo Hannay about the scientific web
am 06.07.2007 von http://obiterdictum.wordpress.com/
As director of web publishing for Nature Publishing Group, Timo Hannay’s projects include: Connotea, a social bookmarking service for scientists; Nature Network, a social network for scientists; and Nature Precedings, a site where researchers can share and discuss work prior to publication.
The social and collaborative aspects of these systems are, of course, inspired by their more general counterparts on the web: del.icio.us, Facebook and LinkedIn, the blogosophere. That’s part of what we discussed in this week’s ITConversations podcast. We also talked about my longstanding concern that scientists, like other academics and indeed most professional people, aren’t directly rewarded for being wired into the web. Timo has some great ideas about how to change that. He notes:
This will sound a bit strange coming from someone who works for a journal publisher, but to date, the way that scientists’ output has been measured has been unduly focused on publications in peer-reviewed journals. That is, and will continue to be, a really important part of it, but it’s not the only thing they do.
Here’s one specific proposal for change — measure, and reward, contributions of data:
Biology in recent years has seen a move from what I would characterize as cottage industry science, where everything from data capture through to analysis to writing the paper happens within one lab among a small group of people, to a much more industrial scale where you have different groups, widely dispersed, perhaps who don’t even know each other, doing the data capture versus the analysis versus writing …
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» Connotea: free online reference management for clinicians and scientists
» Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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