Recent replies to "Precedings and Blogs"

Reply from Deepak Singh

Deepak Singh — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 06:19:17 -0000

I am with Egon. One possibility is to put material on Precedings, material that stands on its own and can be discussed. Additional thoughts related to that material and more informal discussions related to that article belong on the authors blog and I wish more scientists do that. Also, discussion can happen anywhere, but can/should be tracked to the material uploaded to Precedings. Unfortunately trackbacks are severely broken in most systems, but to me that is the best way to carry out a conversation. They way, someone visiting Precedings can identify other discussions related to the paper/material they are viewing.

Reply from Hilary Spencer

Hilary Spencer — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 16:31:08 -0000

For clarification, AJ was the source of the original post I was responding to—sorry I didn’t note this earlier.

Reply from AJ Cann

AJ Cann — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 10:47:01 -0000

OK, let’s get to the 500 pound gorilla in the room.
Nothing being discussed here (blogs, Preceedings) has an impact score, so it doesn’t get academic authors any credit from their institutions. In fact, in the run-up to the UK RAE, it may even attract some heat.

Reply from Maxine Clarke

Maxine Clarke — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 10:37:42 -0000

I am not sure why I have come out as Anonymous in the post immediately above as I am logged in, but I am Maxine (Clarke).

Reply from anonymous

anonymous — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 10:36:50 -0000

My twopennorth: Cross-posting between blogs is accepted practice, with appropriate cross-referencing. Attila Csordas, for example, blogs the same posts on The Niche and his personal blog Pimm (by agreement—I think the Niche gets the post first by a day or something like that), and similarly he has a blog on N Network (Science Hacks) that overlaps with Pimm posts (the science publishing-related ones that aren’t about stem cells).
So cross-posting in this way is useful to an individual for specialising-archiving—another example is that I have a general personal blog on which I sometimes review books. I hive off those reviews into another blog solely for that purpose, so that I have a dedicated archive just of that one category. For the book review blog, I chose a different provider, one that links direct into Amazon (etc) so that I can instantly add pictures of the book being reviewed into posts, which I can’t do on my regular blog without up and downloading to/from my hard drive. (The book review blog has other provider limitations though, serious ones (it is Vox), but good for this particular purpose.)
Seems to me that if Precedings is a “posting” site not a formal “publishing” site (which is a grey area given that Precedings provides dois but blogs don’t), there is no reason not to cross-post so long as the posts are also crossreferenced—as it provides useful options for user specialisation as in the examples I’ve provided.

Reply from Hilary Spencer

Hilary Spencer — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 22:17:53 -0000

Posting on both your blog and Precedings is probably how you would get the most visibility for your research. Precedings allows one one to link the Precedings version to other versions on the Internet, such as one on your blog (see the bottom of the document information page for a particular submission). We hope that this feature makes it possible for authors to get the benefits of both options.

Euan’s point about commenting in multiple locations is a great point. There are many reasons why people might prefer to comment in one location over another. Blogs can seem more informal and more intimate than Precedings. However, having a single login for Precedings makes it easy for one to comment on multiple submissions. I think that ultimately the user will probably comment in the place where they feel most comfortable.

Reply from Euan Adie

Euan Adie — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 10:54:00 -0000

You should feel free to do both – post on your blog and Precedings, IMHO. The downside to this is that ideally you want commentary in one place – Precedings is the most visible, stable location but your blog is where the people most likely to comment on your work are.

(AJ: actually I think the stability of blogs is more of an issue for blogs hosted on Wordpress and Blogger… it’s not so bad now but a while back you couldn’t move for bloggers complaining about how Blogger had removed their blogs as spam, in error, without making a backup first).

Reply from Santosh Patnaik

Santosh Patnaik — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 22:10:43 -0000

Scientific information is always discovered and utilized better if it co-exists with other information. And so there is PubMed and not a Yahoo index, society journals and not private pamphlets.

Preprints that are in a repository of preprints can be discovered better (e.g., one would turn to search Nature Precedings and not Google blog posts), and can be utilized better (e.g., by identifying other preprints on the same topic). And, as Hilary enumerates, there are other reasons for posting to a preprint system and not a blog.

Still, Nature Precedings should be used to post only ‘publishable’ material: original, detailed, formally composed, and hopefully new.

Reply from AJ Cann

AJ Cann — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 13:05:38 -0000

While the charge of instability could be leveled at self-hosted blogs, it does not apply to sites such as wordpress.com, or blogger.

Reply from Egon Willighagen

Egon Willighagen — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 04:30:39 -0000

Partly agreed. I see it like this: Preceedings to a blog is like what is a conference proceedings to a work meeting.

To me, my blogs is the most efficient way to communicate and discuss things with fellow scientists. Where I used to email things I found interested or discovered via mailing lists (often more than one), I now put them in my blog.

BTW, I do not plan to not post my conference slides to NP, and am not really interested in seeing them show up on NP. Powerpoint like presentations are too informal, require to much context: they lack the detail as good slides are really the extras during a presentation, not the exact content. This means that the life span of such NP contributions is much smaller, and that stability is actually a non-issue: it simply does not contain enough details to be useful in a couple of years. (They might of course… but then they would be bad presentation slides).

For me it is, therefore, very important to be able to browse NP and get notified about new submissions in NP where I can filter out slide like documents. Blogs are actually more suitable for distributing slides. Or do it in the following way: make every slide an item in your blog. That seems to work for some successful bloggers.

BTW, the first paper I contributed is actually a conference contribution. A virtual conference, and the contribution has the form of a paper instead of slides.