All science bloggers do a lot of reading for background information, or write blog posts based on a (newly published) paper, blog post or news item. So I thought that it would be a good idea to collect those references in a single place. Reading lists are perfect for this, and they are easy to create and maintain with web-based reference managers.
The Scholarly Kitchen is a group blog started by the Society for Scholarly Publishing in 2008. The blog posts by authors Kent Anderson, Phil Davis, David Crotty, Michael Clarke, etc. are an always interesting – and often thought-provoking – read about scholarly publishing. Two recent posts looked at peer review.
On Monday Jenny Rohn published a blog post Peer review is no picnic that concludes: So the next time you hear someone asserting that scientists aren’t critical, of their own work or that of their colleagues, remember that if a finding has made its way into a reputable journal, it’s most likely despite every last objection that the researcher and all of his lab-mates could come up with – to say nothing of those nasty peer reviewers.
On Wednesday PLoS BLOGs launched with a splash. We (both PLoS BLOGs as a whole and me individually) got a lot of positive feedback and words of encouragement – so we are off to a good start. As both our community manager Brian Mossop and myself are currently in London for the Science Online London Conference, we could celebrate the launch in person. With a good pint of British ale Thursday evening.
Google announced last week that they will stop further development of Google Wave, and essentially shut down the service by the end of the year. Some of the more exciting parts of Wave will be reused in other Google products or – since many parts of Google Wave have been made available under an Open Source license, in products by other companies.
Flipboard is a personalized social magazine for the iPad. The free application was released on July 22, and instantly created a lot of buzz. Because of the overwhelming interest, they had to create a waitlist for the personal features and I could only sign up for and start using them a few days ago. Flipboard is a true iPad application, it would not work the same on a laptop computer or mobile phone.
The last few days we have seen a number of blog posts reflecting on the pros and cons of science blogging networks. Bora Zivkovic last week announced his departure from scienceblogs.com, and in his must-read post reflected on the history of science blogging (A Farewell to Scienceblogs: the Changing Science Blogging Ecosystem). Richard Grant on Saturday wrote down his thoughts On Nature Network.
Social media and privacy have a complicated relationship, as using social media implies giving up at least some privacy. And the value of a social networking site is directly related not only to the number of users, but also the extend of personal data that the site has collected.
Peer review is central to how we evaluate science and therefore how journal papers, grants, and jobs are awarded. Peer review is done in many different ways, and has dramatically changed in the last 25 years. But the purpose of peer review is still to improve the quality of research by providing feedback and to evaluate the quality of research. The evaluation serves as a filter both for limited resources (e.g. grants or jobs;
