by fdecomite
More on bloggers and OA:
[Via Open Access News]
Bora Zivkovic, ResearchBlogging.org, v.2.0, A Blog Around the Clock, August 29, 2008.
… [W]e took a little look [at the new release of ResearchBlogging.org] at the PLoS HQ and noticed that out of 87 pages of ‘all results’ there are 8 pages of ‘PLoS’ results – implying that about 10% of all the [ResearchBlogging.org] posts are on PLoS papers from all seven journals – and of those, 4 pages are just on PLOS ONE papers – which is about 5%. All I can say is w00t! for Open Access – when bloggers can read, bloggers will write.
ResearchBlogging demonstrates how blogging can be used to disburse information. The individual writers serve as excellent filters. It is like a journal club online, providing a way to cut through some of the jargon in a paper and see what its real relevance is.
It is one step above “Hey, did you see the paper in the latest Blood about X?” Now when an interesting paper is found, a short synopsis, with the proper attribution is available to a large network.
Technorati Tags: Science, Social media, Web 2.0
Do you think there’s a bias from science bloggers toward papers published in open access journals? From my reading, there is a very strong current of open access advocacy in the online community. Are the numbers being skewed because of this? Ditto for numbers of comments one sees on an open access paper in PLOS versus comments left on other journals?
Then again, given the quantity of Bora’s own posting, I wonder what those numbers look like if you remove all of his blog posts about articles.
I would agree with you that at this point the numbers may just not really mean anything. I do know that when I write about an article online, I tend to chose ones that others can also access.
So, when the NYT had all of its columnists behind a pay-wall, I stopped quoting them. I takes away from the information flow to quote information others can not verify.
This holds true for scientific research also. My own tendencies when I write about scientific articles, ones that I want others to be able to read, is to chose papers that the readers can access for free.
The point is to give them an intro to the real article, to help disburse its information to a larger audience.