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In April 2008, Cameron Neylon, a chemist from the University of Southampton, used FriendFeed messaging to post a request for assistance in building molecular models. Pretty quickly Pawel Szczesny replied, and said he could help out.

Einstein’s greatest contribution to science was his theory of gravity, often called the general theory of relativity. He worked on and off on this theory between 1907 and 1915, often running into great difficulties. By 1912, he had come to the astonishing conclusion that our ordinary conception of geometry, in which the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees, is only approximately correct, and a new kind of geometry is needed to correctly describe space and time. This was a great surprise to Einstein, and also a great challenge, since such geometric ideas were outside his expertise. Fortunately for Einstein and for posterity, he described his difficulties to a mathematician friend, Marcel Grossman. Grossman said that many of the ideas Einstein needed had already been developed by the mathematician Bernhard Riemann. It took Einstein three more years of work, but Grossman was right, and this was a critical point in the development of general relativity.

How could you measure the different sorts of contributions a scientist can make on a blog – outreach, education, and research? These are not easy questions to answer. Yet they must be answered before scientific blogging will be accepted as a valuable professional scientific contribution.

making many more types of content available than just scientific papers; allowing creative reuse and modification of existing work through more open licensing and community norms; making all information not just human readable but also machine readable; providing open APIs to enable the building of additional services on top of the scientific literature, and possibly even multiple layers of increasingly powerful services.

The adoption of the journal system was achieved by subsidizing scientists who published their discoveries in journals. This same subsidy now inhibits the adoption of more effective technologies, because it continues to incentivize scientists to share their work in conventional journals, and not in more modern media.

“Work. Finish. Publish.”

Nature’s 2006 trial of open commentary on papers undergoing peer review at Nature. The trial was not a success.

The contrast between the science comment sites and the success of the amazon.com reviews is stark.

there is a marked reluctance among researchers to offer open comments

In 1999, Garry Kasparov, the greatest chessplayer of all time, played and eventually won a game of chess against a “World Team” which decided its moves by the votes of thousands of chessplayers, many rank amateurs; instead of the easy victory he expected, he got the most challenging game of his career, a game he called “the greatest game in the history of chess”.

From the outside, scientists currently appear puzzlingly slow to adopt many online tools.

Wikipedia is a second example where scientists have missed an opportunity to innovate online.

One of the worst performing GM plants in 1980 closes down, opens up two years later under Toyota management, almost the entire same employees said the entire union leadership. Within a couple of years it becomes the most productive plant in the U.S.

A) that people systematically do not behave according to the traditions of selfish rationality under controlled conditions; B) that when you set up systems with different assumptions, you get different behavior, and you get actually better results. There is a beautiful study, for example, from two or three years ago about knowledge workers. Knowledge work is one of the hard things to get precise in contracts. How do you tell somebody, "How creative have you been at 11:00 in the morning?" And so that's a classic place where having precise contracts to precisely monitor what you do and what you don't do becomes very difficult.

They use chunks of time, particularly chunks of time that they used to spend watching passively finished goods as entertainment, in an activity that's a social activity and a creative activity and an expressive activity on a very large scale. This is tilting all of our information, knowledge and cultural industries something between a quarter and two-thirds of the way around. Because in addition, government will continue to fund some science, some arts, et cetera. Commercial organizations will continue to do the same thing. Individual selling in markets will, but also social production now comes in as a major force. And that re-aligns in different industries more, in different industries less.

But the decision point is essentially which of these worlds we go. And it's a decision point we're making through law. The copyright wars are a classic instance of trying to set up the technology and the legal environment in such a way that you can keep the horse in the barn, and rent it out for rides, as opposed to having all the horses out. Situations where you get digital rights management and criminalization of breaking or distributing things that overcome digital rights management.

the non-fungible is the human relationships. That's where the talks come from, that's where the services and teaching come from, that's where the live performance for the musician comes from.

In some cases the spectacle is really the equivalent of the rock star live performance. It's not at all about the human relation, it's about the unique experience. Which in some sense is somewhere between the human connection and the artifact.

The Berkman Center is now quickly becoming very interdisciplinary, and part of what we are doing is to build open research platforms that will allow any social scientist to use web-based tools to conduct both controlled experiments and large-scale, computationally-supported observational studies.

scientists need new tools to help them deal with the data windfall, and that's what projects like Oceans 2.0 will provide

One way to manage the data boom will involve tagging data, much as users of websites like Flickr tag images or readers of blogs and web pages can "Digg" articles they approve.

If data tagging is analogous to Flickr or Digg, other initiatives look a bit like Facebook.

Eva Amsen, an active Nature Network user and blogger who recently completed a biochemistry doctorate at University of Toronto, says it's a good way for scientists to exchange ideas and get help with problems, something that otherwise happens mostly within one lab.

As blogs and sites like Twitter allow ordinary people to share details of their day-to-day lives, some scientists are sharing their laboratory activities through open lab notebooks online.

"You build your career by publishing papers in peer-reviewed journals," he says. "You don't do it by contributing to wikis."

Tools that help researchers do their work are already catching on. Technologies that leave behind the traditional model of career-building through publication are taking longer, Nielsen says — but they will come.