Science 2.0

From Scientific American:

...blogging, tagging and social networking, dubbed Web 2.0, have ... expanded people’s ability ... to publish it, edit it and collaborate about it—forcing such old-line institutions as journalism, marketing and even politicking to adopt whole new ways of thinking and operating....

A small but growing number of researchers ... have begun to carry out their work via the wide-open tools of Web 2.0. And although their efforts are still too scattered to be called a movement—yet—their experiences to date suggest that this kind of Web-based “Science 2.0” is not only more collegial than traditional science but considerably more productive.

In principle, ... scientists should find a transition to Web 2.0 perfectly natural. After all, since the time of Galileo and Newton, scientists have built up their knowledge about the world by “crowdsourcing” the contributions of many researchers and then refining that knowledge through open debate. “Web 2.0 fits so perfectly with the way science works. It’s not whether the transition will happen but how fast,” ...

... for Science 2.0 advocates, the real significance is the technologies’ potential to move researchers away from an obsessive focus on priority and publication toward the kind of openness and community that were the supposed hallmarks of science in the first place. “I don’t see the disappearance of the formal research paper anytime soon,” Surridge says. “But I do see the growth of lots more collaborative activity building up to publication.”