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).
