I’ve been watching the reflection on the Science Blogs diaspora and the wider conversation on what next for the Science Blogosphere with some interest because I remain both hopeful and not very confident that someone somewhere is really going crack the problem of effectively using the social web for advancing science. I don’t really have anything to add to Bora’s masterful summary of the larger picture but I wanted to pick out something that was interesting to me and that I haven’t seen anyone else mention.

The following is my contribution to a collection prepared by the British Library and released today at the Wellcome Trust, called “Driving UK Research. Is copyright a help or a hindrance?” which is being released under a CC-BY-NC license. The British Library kindly allowed authors to retain copyright on their contributions so I am here releasing the text into the public domain via a CCZero waiver.

The idea that “it’s not information overload, it’s filter failure” combined with the traditional process of filtering scholarly communication by peer review prior to publication seems to be leading towards the idea that we need to build better filters by beefing up the curation of research output before it is published. Here I argue that this is backwards and that the ‘filter failure’ soundbite is maybe unfortunate in the context of scholarly communications. The web won’t reduce the cost of curation, but it has reduced the cost of publication. This means that instead of building filters to prevent stuff getting on the web it is more productive to focus on enhancing discovery. A focus on enabling discovery can both deliver for researchers and provide business models that are more aligned with the way the web works.

I talk a lot about building tools that make it easy capture all the objects that we create as part of the research process and then connect all of these up together. Thus far there have been small and limited demonstrators. This is a proposal to build something that demonstrates the general principle at this coming weekend’s Science Hack Day in London.

Last Thursday night I was privileged to be invited to the 10th anniversary celebrations for BioMedCentral and to help announce and give the first BMC Open Data Prize. Peter Murray-Rust has written about the night and the contribution of Vitek Tracz to the Open Access movement. Here I want to focus on the prize we gave, the rationale behind it, and the (difficult!) process we went through to select a winner.

Cultural change won’t happen overnight and may never happen at all. Policy mandates are a blunt instrument and may lead to a backlash. So how do we align incentives for researchers with the aim of making their research outputs more widely and effectively useable? Get the metrics right and the competitive market could manage the rest of the optimisation problem for us.

If you’ve been around either myself or Deepak Singh you will almost certainly have heard the Jeff Jonas/Jon Udell soundbite: ‘Data finds data. Then people find people’. The naïve analysis of the success of consumer social networks and the weaknesses of science communication has lead to efforts that almost precisely invert the Jonas/Udell concept. In the case of most of these “Facebooks for Scientists” the idea is that people find people, and then they connect with data through those people. But what if we built social networks for data, where they could interact, find neighbours, and play games amongst themselves?

I wrote a few weeks back about the idea of re-imagining the formally published scientific paper as an aggregation of objects. I asserted that the tools for achieving this are more or less in place. Actually that is only half true. The tools for storing, displaying, and even to some extent archiving communications in this form do exist, at least in the form of examples. But we still need authoring and publishing tools to make the overall vision work.

There has been an awful lot recently written and said about author-pays business models for scholarly publishing and a lot of it has focussed on PLoS ONE. Most recently Kent Andersen has written a piece on Scholarly Kitchen that contains a number of fairly serious misconceptions about the processes of PLoS ONE. This is a shame because I feel this has muddled the much more interesting question that was intended to be the focus of his piece. Nonetheless here I want to give a robust defence of author pays models and of PLoS ONE in particular.

Friday and Saturday last week I had the privilege of attending the first Sage Congress. Hopefully this will be the first in a series of posts that cover that meeting because there is simply so much to think about and so much to just get on and do. This is not a post about public engagement work by scientists. It is not about going to schools and giving talks. It is not about engaging with the main stream media to present your work to the great unwashed. It is about engaging with the people who will be driving your research agenda within ten years, about how the way researchers connect with society will be changed over the next decade whether they like it or not.