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Thursday, November 17, 2011

The New Einsteins Will Be Scientists Who Share From cancer to cosmology, researchers could race ahead by working together—online and in the open

Michael Nielsen on Networked Science - WSJ.com -- 

this is a short but sweet article extolling the virtues of online networking for scientists -- it's definitely the way of the future, and I imagine that in a few short years manuscript impact factors will be a measure of the past -- instead people will look at how many other scientists read and cited your works -- open sharing of manuscripts by using the BMC and PLoS styles of journals will also help to rapidly disseminate information -- the trick now is getting everyone involved in the discussion, from senior faculty who aren't quite trusting of the internet, to postdocs and grad students who have possibly never been to the medical library in their institution - but visit it virtually online multiple times a day -- people can pretend but no one has the answers to everything, even if they are the expert in the area -- so why not start a discussion online about our favorite topic - and maybe we can all get to the answers sooner!  And speaking of the value of open access journals -- we published a manuscript in BMC Research Notes a couple of weeks ago - it went immediately into the ":highly accessed" classification - having garnered over 700 downloads in the first two weeks online -- tell me a single hard-print journal that can match that...

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