No tenure for Technorati: Science and the Social Web - john wilbanks' blog - john wilbanks' blog on Nature Network

Michel Roland's personal annotations on this page

Bibliothecaire bookmarked on 2007-11-22 nature open_science recherche_2.0 research science social_network social_networks

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.
Second problem is that scientific communication is a different beast than normal human communication. Scientists talk to their friends, but when talking to people they don’t know, it’s much more formal. They use communication to spec theories and to claim ground as theirs.
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.”
Third problem is that there are no rewards for participating in these new forms of communication. Thus the title of the post. Has anyone gotten tenure for a well-linked blog in the life sciences?
Citations are a place in science where you have demonstrated something to be true (or at least an approximation of truth). They’re a formal style of communication that says, not only is this a fact of nature, but I – ME - am the one who proved it to be so.

This link has been bookmarked by 4 people . It was first bookmarked on 22 Nov 2007, by Michel Roland.