Colin’s Beauty Pages

I went to a conference on science blogging on Saturday.  I am sure that it wasn’t the first one on the subject but it was the first one I have heard of and t was the first one I have been to.  It was certainly a bit of a geekfest, with many people not just blogging at the conference but actually blogging during the talks and raising questions from people not present picked up fromt Twitter.  (If you don’t know what Twitter is don’t worry - I didn’t know much about it before this conference either.)

The conference was organised by Nature, who publish one of the most prestigious of print journals in science. Science journals are very important to professional scientists.  For someone who works mainly in research it is largely what gets published that determines his or her career.   The scientific press has a pecking order with the well known journals having a lot more kudos than the lesser known ones.  There is a system called peer review where papers are only published when they have been approved by experts in the field.

This process acts as a sort of quality control process for scientists and it is this peer review process that gives information published in the scientific literature its authority.  That’s why I quote papers published in science journals whenever I can on this blog.

It was quite brave of Nature to embrace a technology that could potentially put them out of business. The peer review system for print journals is a tradition that has grown up over many years, but it is quite conceivable that some kind of web based alternative could arise.  The web has a lot of advantages over paper.  For a start it is cheaper.  Scientists are usually short of money.  It is also a lot more flexible.  You can include videos for one obvious example.  You can also include graphs in a format that allows other researchers to zoom in on bits that you didn’t realise were important.  And probably best of all, it is much quicker.  Scientists are usually short of money but they are almost always short of time.  There are plenty of problems still to be overcome, but it would not surprise me if in 10 years time it was commonplace to publish online.  It might be that a full print publication becomes a really rare acolade reserved only for the most significant of papers - a bit like using a horse drawn carriage for a wedding. I spoke to one woman who worked for a purely online journal- so the ground is already being laid for this.

Anyway it was great to spend a day in the company of scientists.  They are good company despite the anorak wearing image and I hope I can get to more events like that one in future.  Many thanks to all the people I spoke to their and a big thank you to the organisers for an original and well run event.