Another thought on science communication - science is already a wiki if you look at it a certain way. It's just a really, really inefficient one - the incremental edits are made in papers instead of wikispace, and significant effort is expended to recapitulate the existing knowledge in a paper in order to support the one-to-three new assertions made in any one paper. And the papers are written in a highly specialized form of text that demonstrates the expertise of the writer in the relevant domain, but can form a language barrier to scientists outside the domain understanding the key facts.

Puneet Kishor, one of our fellows, got it right. We shouldn't use the law to make it hard to do the wrong thing. We should use technology to make it easy to do the right thing.

Björn Brembs Prof. Sudhaus (Berlin), wrt scholarly publishing: "a record in high jump doesn't get any better by the place where it was reached"

We no longer have to wait two or more years to count citations and find out how influential a research paper was in its field. That's a game-changer and one that flies in the face of the 50-year flawed gold standard relying on which journal you published in, rather than the merits of the paper, to determine tenure and grant funding. Now, each paper has an equal chance to be measured and discovered. This isn't like Napster and ignoring copyright, but more akin to what iTunes did - bundling additional information with individual tracks. Here, those tracks are research papers and this will help the journal publisher, the researcher, and the university library.

When I was an undergraduate at MIT we shared one computer that took up a whole building. The cellphone in your pocket is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful. That's a billion times the sales performance - and we'll do it again in the next 25 years.

There are very few examples of mindblowingly original ideas. People working in related areas tend to come up with similar ideas. In a world where any of your competitors can blog their ideas as soon as they think of them, hoarding ideas might be the more dangerous choice. It doesn't matter what you think about the professional status of blogs. It doesn't matter most scientists don't blog. The only thing that matters is that at least one of your competitors is willing to blog their research and that the traditional journals in your field are willing to accept blog posts (and other Web2.0 publication formats) as valid references.

"I have avoided competitive situations, because I am not a baboon".

Insistence on using the formalized kabuki dance in science communication is the way to keep the power relations intact. Saying "don't be angry" is the code for "use the rhetoric at which I excel so I can destroy you more easily and protect my own spot in the hierarchy". It is an invitation to the formal turf, where those on the inside have power over those who cannot or will not use the kabuki dance. This has always been the way to keep women, minorities and people from developing countries outside the club, waiting outside the Gate. If, for reasons of your gender, race, nationality or class you are uncomfortable doing the kabuki dance, every time you enter the kabuki contest you will lose and the insider will win. The same applies outside science, e.g., to mainstream journalism and politics.

Not just in education, but also in research and publishing, the Web is turning a competitive world into a collaborative world. Our contributions to the community (how much we give) will be more important for our reputation (and thus job and career) than products of our individual, secretive lab research.