John Wilbanks, Executive Director at Science Commons, has a nice post about the challenges of applying Web 2.0 (Social Web) technologies to science. He lists 3 major barriers:
The first [barrier] 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. Before you disagree, riddle me this. Would you fund a company with a total potential customer base of 60,000? That’s neuroscience, all of it, globally, and it’s a generous number.
That’s just a small number for Social Web. There’s a lot more college students for facebook than there are neuroscientists for neurobook. And the scary thing is that leading authorities have recommended the best way to deal with the life sciences PhD glut is to lower the number of life scientists!
While he may be right, I am not yet convinced that the current size of the crowd is a limiting factor. To write a Wikipedia, you need a crowd of millions, since for any one topic most people are non-experts. However, if the focus is solving problems in neuroscience, a crowd of 60,000 neuroscientists may be just enough.
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.
Zoom in. The people in one subdiscipline (let’s say brain function) probably have a lot in common with another (brain pathology) – same genes, proteins, pathways, areas of the brain. But they don’t do a lot of talking. They’re outside each other’s social micro-circles. They don’t knock back pina coladas together at SfN, look at the same poster sessions, attend the same lunchtime roundtables. They sure don’t read the same papers. Who has time to do that? And there’s a good chance that a scientist would draw a tighter boundary around her communications outside that micro-circle – you might engage in wild-ass guesses with your friends, but if you did that in front of a stranger scientist, you could look stupid. Worse, you could be right and get scooped.
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Put simply, if a scientist isn’t going to say it to her colleagues at a conference, she probably isn’t going to blog it.
Although subdivisions certainly exists on paper, in practice, neuroscience is increasingly interdisciplinary. For instance, in my lab of about a dozen, we focus on insect olfaction, and have people working on genetics, behavior, electrophysiology, imaging, and computational modeling. So in addition to staying current in the insect olfaction literature, individuals in the lab need to stay connected to researchers in other disciplines who use similar tools or perform similar analyses. I imagine if you linked all these people together you would end up with a crowd that was larger and more diverse than one may initially expect.
I agree that breaking away from the current model of scientific communication is not a trivial task. It may take some time before scientists are comfortable will making less formal scientific discourse public. However I do think there is plenty of valuable and insightful discourse that takes place at conferences, lectures, and in journal clubs, and we are only now starting to see some of that information appear online in places like PLoS ONE, Nature Precedings, and science blogs.
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? I’ve asked at every university and I’ve yet to hear of even one place where there’s an entry on the tenure review form. And again, if you blogged a novel theory and someone else won the Nobel for proving it to be true, well..that’d be bad. There’s no way to reward you, even if you’d timestamped it on your blog.
There is however an extended space for your citations on every last one of those review forms. Because citations aren’t like blog posts, where you lay out a wild theory (see for reference: this very post) for the world. 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 isn’t the kind of communication one blogs, because there’s no reward for it. That’s a fundamental disconnect that isn’t yet addressed.
The current reward and tenure system is certainly problematic, especially for young non-tenured researchers who may be more willing to adopt the Web as a new form of communication. While it seems certain that the Web will drive a culture shift science, I wouldn’t expect the shift to start with the reward and tenure system. Expect it to start like all things on the Web, from the bottom up.
So far, the science 2.0 revolution has been off to a slow start, but it may just be that we’re still missing that key disruptive technology. More than likely, that technology is being developed right now. It can’t get here soon enough, because when it does, that’s when the fun starts.
