I have a series of posts lined up for the next few days with the loose theme of Science 2.0. Of course I don't like all encompassing marketing terms such as Web 2.0 or Science 2.0, but they are good enough for the time being. In keeping with the Science 2.0 theme, I found this post via my RSS aggegator, and the original was picked up from Postgenomic. Pedro Beltrao has an interesting post on Kevin kelly (author and technologist) who has this prediction about the evolution of science:
Wiki-Science - The average number of authors per paper continues to rise. With massive collaborations, the numbers will boom. Experiments involving thousands of investigators collaborating on a "paper" will commonplace. The paper is ongoing, and never finished. It becomes a trail of edits and experiments posted in real time - an ever evolving "document."
Go read Pedro's post for more thoughts on the big issue here: credit. Bedro also raises the possibility of implementing WIki-Science by authoring a paper on the nodalpoint wiki pages. While I welcome anyone to use the wiki pages to collaboratively write a paper (Google's new acquisition is also an option), I nonetheless must agree with both Pedro and the first commenter: it ain't gonna happen until those in-charge have a change of mind, and they wont change their minds until we figure out a new funding model that isn't tied directly to credit.
Maybe an alternative approach is micro-publications, short original pieces of science which only tell part of the story. Maybe this way contributions could be tracked and there would then be opportunity to work on more meta-publications (a collection of micro-publications).
Comments
Clear goals and thinking needed here
I support community collaboration on all fronts, including research and I agree that there are unsavoury aspects to working in science. I also think that a lot of these commentators, who are clearly not trained scientists, fail to understand the psychology and mental approach to research of a successful scientist.
No piece of work is ever finished. Certainly something like a complete genome could keep one person occupied for their entire working life, if they so chose. However, an essential skill for a scientist is knowing when to stop - either to move onto a new aspect or because they have enough results to publish. In one sense yes, we are all responsible for the failings of the system, because we are trained to break up our findings into as many discrete units (papers) as possible, so as to achieve a track record for funding. But there's more to it than that - there is real skill involved in weaving a self-contained narrative out of your data so as to make a contribution to the field. At the same time, publication gives you the psychological closure required to move to the next stage, otherwise you burn out and go mad. So it's as much to do with good working practice (in terms of maintaining the mental faculty to work effectively) as it is to do with conspiratorial notions of the Big Bad System.
I think a major failing of graduate and postdoctoral training is adequate mentoring to get this point across to young researchers. I certainly never had it. You look at successful researchers versus run of the mill researchers and the difference in mental attitude and philosophy is obvious.