I’ve been thinking a lot about the Social Web and the Research Web. Last time out I stuck to the latter. But I see a lot of web 2.0 pushes into the sciences and it’s got me thinking…is science a good target for these technologies and social approaches?
Let’s start with a tautology. The wisdom of crowds depends on the existence of crowds.
And let’s take neuroscience as an example of a scientific discipline. It sits inside of life sciences but it’s big enough to qualify (the Society for Neuroscience claims 38,000 members, and after attending the SfN meeting this year, I agree – they filled up the San Diego convention center).
Neuroscience itself subdivides into lots of specializations. From the wikipedia entry on neuroscience “studies may include the structure, function, evolutionary history, development, genetics, biochemistry, physiology, pharmacology, and pathology of the nervous system.” There’s a lot more after that top-level definition including the enormous cross-disciplinary interest in neuroscience.
So I think it’s worth asking: are there enough people who understand this stuff to follow to the water hole? Is the crowd big enough to be wise?
I am unconvinced. Slicing those 38,000 people into all the subdisciplines means none of the subdisciplines have very many people, and they all seem to know each other.
I am convinced, on the other hand, of the absolute importance of information reformats that make it easy to use Social Web. Social Web has an enormous role to play here. Enormous. It will play a critical role in sharing wisdom between scientists. But we can’t rely on it to extract the wisdom here.
There’s three barriers to Social Web extracting the wisdom in sciences as it does elsewhere.
The first is the lack of a crowd – not only is the total number of scientists in any one field pretty low in terms of internet numbers, but it’s even lower in reality with specialization. Before you disagree, riddle me this. Would you fund a company with a total potential customer base of 60,000? That’s neuroscience, all of it, globally, and it’s a generous number.
That’s just a small number for Social Web. There’s a lot more college students for facebook than there are neuroscientists for neurobook. And the scary thing is that leading authorities have recommended the best way to deal with the life sciences PhD glut is to lower the number of life scientists!
If you don’t believe me, I recommend spending some time trying to learn the central dogma of the blood-brain barrier. You can start with wikipedia and go from there. It’s complicated and the good stuff is firewalled, and google doesn’t help much. There’s not a lot of collaborative filtering for this, and no one has geotagged the useful images. That doesn’t mean that Social Web will never work here, just that it’s not going to jumpstart itself as it has elsewhere.
(there is a secondary problem of scientists not wanting to be followed to waterholes – what a lab is reading is a very good clue as to its unpublished research, and labs like to keep that stuff secret, for good reason…it’s how you get the next paper, the next speech, and the next grant…)
Second problem is that scientific communication is a different beast than normal human communication. Scientists talk to their friends, but when talking to people they don’t know, it’s much more formal. They use communication to spec theories and to claim ground as theirs.
Zoom in. The people in one subdiscipline (let’s say brain function) probably have a lot in common with another (brain pathology) – same genes, proteins, pathways, areas of the brain. But they don’t do a lot of talking. They’re outside each other’s social micro-circles. They don’t knock back pina coladas together at SfN, look at the same poster sessions, attend the same lunchtime roundtables. They sure don’t read the same papers. Who has time to do that? And there’s a good chance that a scientist would draw a tighter boundary around her communications outside that micro-circle – you might engage in wild-ass guesses with your friends, but if you did that in front of a stranger scientist, you could look stupid. Worse, you could be right and get scooped.
So the problem is that people with common knowledge don’t share it with each other, simply because of social competition (and time constraints, but that’s for another post). It’s not a matter of “web 2.0 technology will trump old ways of sharing stuff” (a statement I tend to believe is true) but a matter of “stuff that doesn’t get shared anyway isn’t likely to get shared simply because the technology exists to share it.”
Put simply, if a scientist isn’t going to say it to her colleagues at a conference, she probably isn’t going to blog it.
Third problem is that there are no rewards for participating in these new forms of communication. Thus the title of the post. Has anyone gotten tenure for a well-linked blog in the life sciences? I’ve asked at every university and I’ve yet to hear of even one place where there’s an entry on the tenure review form. And again, if you blogged a novel theory and someone else won the Nobel for proving it to be true, well..that’d be bad. There’s no way to reward you, even if you’d timestamped it on your blog.
There is however an extended space for your citations on every last one of those review forms. Because citations aren’t like blog posts, where you lay out a wild theory (see for reference: this very post) for the world. Citations are a place in science where you have demonstrated something to be true (or at least an approximation of truth). They’re a formal style of communication that says, not only is this a fact of nature, but I – ME – am the one who proved it to be so.
This isn’t the kind of communication one blogs, because there’s no reward for it. That’s a fundamental disconnect that isn’t yet addressed.
So if you put together these three problems – crowd’s too small, communication’s too formal, and no one gets rewarded – how do you overcome this to get Social Web’s very-real benefits into the sciences?
There’s a few places to start. Going in order for the problems…
1. Increase the size of the crowd. This starts with Open Access, I think. More people reading the source materials is simply the only way to go. We need to get away from the AOL/Prodigy/Walled Garden approach to the content. There’s people out there who can learn this, but not without access to the canon.
It also requires Research Web – the re-formatting of the scholarly canon so that it’s not just legally accessible as a set of PDFs, but something that can be endlessly manipulated, searched, indexed, mashed up, and more. Scientific knowledge is inherently compatible with the idea of wiki – each paper is a nodal set of relationships between linkable entities – but it’s got to be reformatted first.
Right now the combination of publisher firewalls and underlying data formats is a choke point on Social Web utility here, because it just keeps anyone who isn’t already in the Science Guild on the outskirts.
2. Incentivize participation. This is both Social and Research Web here. It could be as simple as having a contest for whoever creates the most bookmarks, curates the local edges of a semantic graph, tags the most papers, whatever. It could be as simple as having a Technorati rank be considered in faculty hiring (though this is as fraught with problems as citations, if not more!). It could be asking for proof of the reverberation of one’s research and ideas in any number of ways. But we have to get to a world where scientists see value in talking to each other more than they do.
I do not think that journals are going away. I think they’ll shift. But I think that the Social Web has a huge chance to get the kind of less-formal communication into an exploding space of content. Think about conference posters and talks instead of journals – that’s perfect blogfodder (Nature Precedings is a good example for this kind of thing). Sharing protocols and methods (Open Wet Ware). Claiming one’s links (SciLink). Rapid fire publishing (PLoS One). All this stuff makes total sense to me. But as long as the reward systems bias in favor of the old world, the technology is going to have a hard time winning out…
Disease funders, research funders? I’m looking at you. You have the leverage to start this discussion better than anyone else…
Last updated:
Monday, 19 Nov
2007 - 19:08 UTC
Even users could do more to create incentive systems. If we could get together to create items that are rewarded (published research, reviews, book chapters, etc) then we would all gain by using some spare cycles to get more than we would alone. There are also as you mentioned a strong culture barrier.
John, amazing post. This has been a quite hot topic lately. There is definitely a shift within journals, such as Nature, to open the process a bit but the overall problem is what Pedro said, there’s a strong culture barrier that’s been sitting solid for quite some time.
This solid barrier has been fine so far since globalization was far away, but now we are all online and very (very!) close in contact and the barrier needs to disappear or at least mutate into something more flexible.
I find the “being scooped” idea as the one that keeps most scientists from sharing their ideas, but if there was a solid platform where people could lay out their ideas so that the scientific community could see that in fact YOU were the first to mention such an idea, I believe that you’d have to be a nasty guy to steal the idea in front of the scientific community.
Basically, the more exposed your ideas, the more you are recognized for them and if by any chance you are in fact scooped, the majority of the science community (Nobel jury panel included!) will know you were the origin of the idea and not the bad-scientist guy!
John, nice post on the challenges we face in applying the power of the Social Web to science. Regarding the wisdom of the crowd, I am not yet convinced that the current size of the crowd is a limiting factor. To write a Wikipedia, you need a crowd of millions, since for any one topic most people are non-experts. However, if the focus is solving problems in neuroscience, a crowd of 60,000 neuroscientists may be just enough.
Additionally, while subdivisions certainly exists on paper, in practice, neuroscience is increasingly interdisciplinary. For instance, in my lab of about a dozen, we focus on insect olfaction, and have people working on genetics, behavior, electrophysiology, imaging, and computational modeling. So in addition to staying current in the insect olfaction literature, individuals in the lab need to stay connected to researchers in other disciplines who use similar tools or perform similar analyses. I imagine if you linked all these people together you would end up with a crowd that was larger and more diverse than one may initially expect.
In general, it seems certain that the Web will drive a culture shift in science, but I wouldn’t expect the shift to start with the reward and tenure system. Expect it to start like all things on the Web, from the bottom up. So far, the revolution has been off to a slow start, but it may just be that we’re still missing that key disruptive technology. More than likely, that technology is being developed right now. It can’t get here soon enough, because when it does, that’s when the fun starts.
I agree with Ricardo. It just seems a little egotistic for a researcher to assume that any wild speculation they might utter will be pounced upon by eager competitors.
More than likely, they’ll think you’re full of crap. ;-)
Lots of great thoughts here.
The incentive system can come from the community. But the culture really needs to change. Sometimes it seems academics are more paranoid about being scooped than people in industry are about revealing trade secrets.
Janet Stemwedel, who blogs at Adventures in Ethics and Science has written quite a bit (e.g.) about blogging and her tenure application.
Bill, nice link. But I think this is a place where philosophy and science have forked. I majored in philosophy (though I loved the pre-socratics the most, I wound up focusing on contemporary epistemology and semantics). The field needs evangelism and informal commentary something awful :-) and as such it’s a natural place to encourage blogging.
Life sciences and hard sciences, where tenure comes from the ownership of discoveries via time-stamped peer reviewed papers, strikes me as a different beast. I’m focused on those life sciences for now, and my comments should be read thusly. I’ll try to be more targeted in my text in the future to make that clear.
You might also like Philosopher’s Playground, if interested…
jtw
Yep, I read PP regularly. If I were going to declare a religious affiliation, I might well choose Comedism.